I met my parents in the city for dinner this evening. Which is good, because my work computer decided to install nine updates right when I was shutting down for the evening, and if I hadn’t stayed in Manhattan, I would have missed my train anyway.
We just met for a quick bite at a diner not too far from my office. My mother is taking a course for a few weeks, so it’s altogether possible I’ll meet up with her for dinner regularly while that’s going on.
My father and I thought we’d maybe spend the hour-plus at the nearby Harry Potter Exhibit in Times Square, but it seemed really over-priced for what it is — a very crowded, not terribly informative, tour past a bunch of replicas. I’m a fan of the books and the movies, for the most part, but even if every single one was a real, honest-to-goodness, held-by-Daniel-Radcliffe prop, that’s not really the sort of thing that’s every really much interested me. I just caught a slightly later train home.
I wish I could say I spent the evening much more productively, but I mostly just stumbled into re-watching Seven (or Se7en, I suppose) on cable. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s elevated so far above what it probably ought to have been by some very good acting, direction, and cinematography. I’m not suggesting that Andrew Kevin Walker’s doesn’t deserve some of the credit…even if the rest of his short resume so far isn’t hugely impressive. But it’s so easy to see how this movie could have gone differently if it hadn’t been so well cast and so well shot. Again, it’s not perfect, and sometimes I think it’s grisly just for the sake of being shocking. (But, then again, it’s maybe also a little more visceral and alive than some of David Fincher’s more recent work. Maybe.) But it does so much so well, and none of it should really work, that you just realize that some movies are just a weird kind of alchemy.
So that plus work, lots and lots of work, was pretty much my Monday. I also finally finished reading The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, which was a lot of fun. Yep, that was a Monday.