Milk, Presidents and Movies

Sorry that my blogging speed has slowed down. Naturally, as more and more holiday events happen, the more "spare" time will dwindle. That is until we reach the new year, when all goes quiet again.

Right now I'm looking at Marcus's first birthday tomorrow. The poor kid is already 365 days old, but thanks to the leap year, it's not enough. And I know that the new teeth coming in are not helping his attitude either. However, he is off the formula and that is the biggest leap in terms of groceries that one can hope for.

Although our refrigerator is much more amusing these days. Sasha is a skim milk drinker, Alya is on the 2%, Marcus is naturally starting on whole milk, and Mr. Lactose Intolerant is on the soy milk. So after Sasha went shopping last night we have five gallon containers of milk, along with three half-gallon containers of soy milk. (8th Continent rocks with Raisin Bran!) Somewhere is farm with an extremely tired cow marked "BSer family cow". All I can say for that cow is, "Moo-moo, moo."

Regarding cash cows, the presidential election is over and my mail carrier can breath a sigh of relief. No more fliers going straight into the recycling bin. No more recorded phone calls on the answering machine. And we will finally be back to our regularly scheduled commercials encouraging us to spend money we don't have. I'm good with that.

One other political note, Sasha and I did stay up and watch the results and the speeches. Both speeches, I felt, were very good. McCain was a class act every step of the way, although I felt he didn't have to try to take all the blame. Obama's speech was fantastic because not only was he grateful, but he also didn't try to sugar coat the times ahead. For me that was very important to acknowledge that his winning wasn't a magical fix to all the woes facing Americans.

Shifting once again, last evening two of my friends came over to hang out. The original thought was to play a few games, but that changed to watching movies. An activity that we haven't done in a long time.

First up was an independent production of a horror story called The Yellow Sign. Fans of H.P. Lovecraft-style stories will appreciate the suspense and creepy facets of this production. Fans of film will be annoyed by the male lead attempting to channel John Malkovich. Mind, when I say horror, it is the vein of eerie and chilling, instead of gross and scary. As a fan of film and H.P. Lovecraft I enjoyed the short film, but felt that a lot could have been done to make it better without a budget increase.

After viewing a couple of short-short films that were on the same DVD, we switched genres in more ways than one. First change was from live action to anime (Japanese animation) and the second was from horror to a story that was romantic at heart.

Yeah, three guys sitting around watching a romantic cartoon. How weak-sauce is that?

(The answer is, "At least we don't live in our parents' basement with Geddy Lee of Rush!")

The movie was Millennium Actress, an animated film directed by Satoshi Kon, who did the thriller Perfect Blue, comedy Tokyo Godfathers, and the surreal Paprika. The story of Millennium Actress is that of a documentary maker who finally got a chance to interview his favorite actress, who tells her story crossing between her actual life and the films she starred in.

The clever bit comes in that the interview and his cameraman find themselves in the movie scenes as observers of the events. Eventually they become involved in the scenes as well, which makes it all the more touching.

It's a film that is supported by the viewer's knowledge Japanese cinema, but still stands as a sweet romantic film with lots of humor and fun dialogue. We watched the movie in Japanese with subtitles, but I suspect that the English dubbing might be a better way to watch as you can pay better attention to details on the screen.*

Be seeing you,

Jon

* Yes, anime viewers, I just stated that the dub might be a better way to watch anime. Until I know Japanese, I think that will be my point of view from here on out. (For non-anime watchers, dubbing versus subtitles used to be a matter of great debate and I had sided on subtitles for a long time.)

Links
H.P. Lovecraft's Wikipedia entry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.P._Lovecraft
Millennium Actress IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0291350/