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December 04, 2004
Out of her hair for two hours, seventeen minutes.
Thanksgiving was great.
We drove 15 hours there and 13 hours back to spend four days with my folks. They loved Her, as expected.
Our return kicked off the first full week of "taking a break."
I started by attending to mundane personal tasks that I never got around to while I was working full-time: getting the title from the loan company that held the note on my VW, quotes from an insurance broker, securing the last paycheck from my former employer.
When you have 83.6 hours of vacation accrued, it's only because you're working too damn much. Don't argue with me on this one.
By Monday afternoon, my to-do list was to-done, and I was in need of direction. The Woman makes a good living working from home, so I was wary of encroaching.
Instead, I kept busy with books, computer games and multo, multo episodes of Law & Order. The Series 2 TiVo records up to 80 hours, and at any given time, we've got at least 5 hours of Dick Wolf's punchy morality tales stacked up on the hard drive.
Mike Post really is something, although he seems to have given up on scoring each episode individually. The shows from the first few seasons have discrete soundtracks, but in later years, the incidental music starts to sound canned. With three L&O series on the air, I imagine it's hard work.
It was after I shared this observation with The Woman that she suggested I get some fresh air, even if it was only on my way to our local movie palace.
By the time I was out of the shower, she'd pulled up a matinee for my consideration.
"Starts at 1:30, so you can definitely make it. Check it out."
She turned her laptop so I could read the Moviefone summary. "Not trying to get rid of you or anything," she said, entirely umprompted.
The synopsis was for "Burn," which was touted as an notable festfilm about two writers and the mindgames they play. As the twin demons of writer's block and professional jealousy were central plot points, my interest was piqued.
I was one of only about 20 in the theater as the lights went down. A few oldsters, a handful of clearly unemployed cineastes, and assorted film nerds with a jones for stale popcorn and movie miasma.
The trailers ran through -- slickly packaged indie films produced by major studios, and guaranteed not to overly challenge an audience.
And then, the main attraction.
It started off with a blaring Ennio Morricone soundtrack (is there any other kind?) and lurid Caribbean montages, which was not at all what I was expecting from a taut psycho-thriller.
Stranger still was the sight of Marlon Brando wearing 19th C. noblewear, standing sternly on the prow of a clipper cutting the waves along the Western Antilles. A toothless old salt breathlessly shouted exposition into his ear for five minutes, establishing the milieu: a Portuguese colony whose largest export was sugar cane, and whose largest problem was the untenable practice of slavery.
For you see, Moviefone got it wrong. The film offered was "Queimada," also known as "Burn!"
I blinked hard at the screen for a few minutes, and sure, I thought about leaving. And then I heard a voice in my head that was so clear, it could have come from the seat behind mine:
"What else have you got going this afternoon?"
Some might have been disheartened by the question, but I settled into my seat to view what turned out to be a somewhat insipid, yet entirely unexpected movie.
Posted by Your Protagonist at December 4, 2004 09:54 PM