#85 - a night in at the movies.

since i've been obsessed with obsessing over tv series recently & was staying in this saturday night, i decided to take a different path & watch a few flicks & since my last entry was entitled "arrr," i decided to keep going that route by watching two flicks with "r" names--rachel getting married & religulous...after catching up on the last five episodes of the office, of course.

i've been meaning to see rachel getting married for quite some time now, pretty much since it came out. for starters, when i first saw previews for the film & realized that it had that "indie" feel that i go for & that tv on the radio's tunde adebimpe was playing rachel's groom, i wanted to see it. i loved him in jump tomorrow & as it is, he's only acted in a handful of films thus far. plus, anne hathaway's in it & she's totally hot & from brooklyn. going in, i could've cared less about the fact that it's directed by jonathan demme. other than silence of the lambs & swimming to cambodia, nothing he's done interests me. anyway, til now, i slacked on seeing it.

i'm a sucker for character-driven stories & rachel getting married is full of characters. anne hathaway is amazing as rachel's recovering addict sister, kym, and all the many many other actors in the film each have numerous chances to shine. for me, one of the other special parts was the use of music. everyone's staying at rachel's family's house for the wedding & since 90% of them seem to have some sort of musical talent & most of the action takes place at the house, there's almost always somebody playing music in the background. one of my pet peeves is when a film tries to make you feel a certain way by laying the sounds of omnipresent, sappy music over the action. in this case, since there's only natural music, it adds to the "realism" of the film. anyway, i didn't cry or anything, but i definitely felt the emotion of the film & i definitely recommend it.

religulous takes an interesting (if not self-indulgent) approach to storytelling, as the film revolves around bill maher doing his shtick & examining the craziness of religion through the filter of his own experience/struggles with the existence of god. one of the guys i share an office with & who, by default, listens to npr with me, leading to multiple, daily, political discussions, passed it on to me last week after watching it. now we can have all sorts of discussions tomorrow!

it was an interesting enough film, but i have the same problem with bill maher that i have with michael moore. although maher's not as annoying as moore, both of them go at people with a smug attitude that subtly mocks their subjects & adds an unspoken "i'm right, but i'll ask you regardless to prove that i'm right" to every one of their questions. i get that it was larry charles' follow up film to borat, so there's some of that "talk to people & they'll expose their own ignorance" thing, but for some reason, i've never viewed that as the best approach to revealing truths.

throughout the film, he shows the craziness of most organized religions, speaking with a rabbi who denies the holocaust, a man who claims to be the second coming of jesus, mormons & scientologists and a number of folks hopeful for the end of the world. he does a solid job of exposing how much of what is written in religious texts is written by men & often overlaps with texts from other religions. all of them are so sure that they're right & their god & text are the one true ones & as such, do crazy things to those who don't believe in what they do & start wars & whatnot...oh humans. you'll believe anything.

#85 - a night in at the movies.
snack: broiled spicy octopus salad
drink: radeberger pilsner


tonight, i'm snacking on a broiled spicy octopus salad, made up of octopus that was totally broiled in the oven, tomatoes, onions, feta & lettuce, all topped with balsamic vinaigrette. it was more of a meal, but i sort of picked at it for a few hours instead of inhaling it all at once, so i'm calling it "snacking." as a rule, i rather enjoy picking at my food, so it worked out just splendidly toward confirming that quirk.

i guess i have to consider myself an octopus lover. that doesn't mean i'm a red wings fan or have ever had sex with an octopus (SFW?), but i very often get it as sushi & occasionally consume calamari, which is squid & like the octopus also a cephalopod. there's just something about the pseudo-chewiness of it that appeals to me. it also goes well with the 2000 horror classic, octopus.

i'm glad i chose to broil it rather than just tossing it cold in with some veggies. it gave it more of a spicy, off-the-grill, bbq flavor. recently, i've been making a lot of salads for dinner, partially due to the aforementioned co-worker above, who has been eating salads every day for lunch, partially due to the positive influence of his girlfriend. as a result, it gave him reason to question my lack of greens in my weekday lunches & i realized he had a point & remembered that i actually like veggies, so i recently began stocking the fridge with the essentials--lettuce, onions, tomatoes--& started picking up avocados & peppers & portobello mushrooms & whatnot on my way home from work so i could have me a salad every once in a while...luckily, that led to leftover veggies for tonight's salad making.

i had a radeberger pilsner along with the salad. i can't say that there's anything special about the radeberger. it's your basic european pilsner, all light & easy to drink, with a subtle bitterness. it's made by a german company out of dresden, the city that we completely leveled with firebombing at the end of world war II, destroying 13 square miles & killing tens of thousands of civilians with repeated incendiary bombings that raised the ground temperature to 2700° F. at least that war had nothing to do with relig...oh, wait. never mind.