Consumables #57

During this week, also known as Dysnowpia 2012 Seattle, many folks are feeling cabin fever. I am hoping that your cabin fever has to do with having your kids home from school and maybe a lack of being able to drive to the store, and does not have anything to do with a for reals blizzard out there or someone busting your kneecaps Misery-style. For some reason when I hear "cabin fever" I always think about Pa Ingalls having to tie a string from his front door to his barn so that he can hang on to it and not get lost in the snow storm, or Kathy Bates and James Caan. I don't know why. I'm just saying, I hope that if you have cabin fever, it is normal people usage of that term, and not me-usage.


For all the cabin-fever-or-not that has been happening this week, I have been light on the consuming, but here's what I've got.

Movies:
Beginners
I thought this was so sweet. Ewan McGregor could not be more charming, and Christopher Plummer was delightful and their relationship just made my heart feel all squeezy. It made me cry a bit.

The Recruit
Sometimes if Nordic Boy is waiting for something- like for me to get ready, or for a friend to come pick him up- he will flip the tv on and find a movie and watch it, just for the ten-fifteen minutes he has to wait. Earlier this week, The Recruit was on tv, so he watched a bit from the latter half of the movie. A day or so later, he was waiting again, and he turned the tv on, and The Recruit was playing again, but it was at an entirely different point in the movie, so he watched ten more minutes. He did this about four times all week. First of all, whatever tv channel that was? Wow, showing a real commitment to Farrell and Pacino there. Second of all, how can one stand to watch a movie all chopped up and in the completely wrong order? I don't care what the movie is, that would drive me insane. At any rate, I saw a fair amount of this movie by default this week. Shockingly, it seemed disjointed to me.

TV
Downton Abbey
Bates' low self-esteem stuff is starting to drive me crazy. And also, Maria Doyle Kennedy really has cornered the market on unwanted-wife roles, what with this and then the whole Queen Catherine thing on The Tudors. That's quite a specific niche.

Parks and Rec
THANK GOODNESS YOU'RE BACK.

Project Runway All Stars
I can't decide how I felt about them having to do an outfit for Miss Piggy. On the one hand, Miss Piggy is awesome. On the other hand, really? They had to design an outfit for a Muppet? On the other hand, I like it when something unpretentious happens on Project Runway. On the other hand, the fact that the designers all gushed and treated it so seriously was weird. As you can see, there were a lot of hands in my argument with myself on this.

Books
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
If Beginners made me cry a little bit in a sweet way, this one made me cry a lot in a sad way. I want to say it was unbelievably sad, but really, unfortunately it was believably sad. The story was well told, and had a lot of access points in it- it's got history, and science, and racial issues, poverty issues, and genealogy, and ethics, and law, and journalism, and family dynamics. All of it works, and works well together. Nicely done, Ms. Skloot. And p.s. I love saying your last name.

Happy Friday!