I wish I could say it had been an especially productive week, but it hasn’t been, really. I mean, I did watch the entire second season of Continuum and a bunch of movies, but I’m not exactly sure that counts.
I like Continuum, which I say having not always been the biggest fan of star Rachel Nichols. Of course, I say that, I now realize, only dimly remembering her at all from Alias and The Inside, and from small roles in the first GI Joe and Star Trek movies. This season may have complicated things with a little too much plot, but maybe that just leaves something for the (now confirmed) third season to make sense of. The show’s Canadian-ness also started to creep out in year two. I don’t necessarily remember them hiding the fact that it takes place in Vancouver in season one, but it’s firmly established in season two.
I also watched a bunch of movies. Earlier in the week, it was Point Break and The Sunset Limited, then Gravity on Wednesday, Magicians last night, and This Is 40, Room 237, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing all today. (Oh, and I re-watched Pee Wee’s Big Adventure this afternoon as well.)
Gravity is more spectacle than story, more experience than anything else. It’s a pretty thrilling experience, and worth the (not insignificant) added cost of seeing it in IMAX and 3D — seriously, this is a film that will not benefit from DVD or television viewing — but there’s not a lot of weight to it beyond the often stunning visuals.
Room 237 is an interesting movie, full of lots of odd theories — most not very compelling — about The Shining and Stanley Kubrick’s intent. The theorists in the film — heard but never seen — who talk about The Shining‘s impossible geographies and recurring visual themes are much more convincing than the ones who claim it’s about the Holocaust or Kubrick’s involvement in the faked moon landing. (“I’m not saying we didn’t go to the moon, I’m just saying that what we saw was faked, and that it was faked by Stanley Kubrick.”) If nothing else, it made me want to re-watch The Shining, though I settled for Kubrick’s earlier noir film The Killing.
Magicians, meanwhile, was pretty terrible, as was This Is 40, although at least the former was just unfunny and didn’t feel like it was forty years in real time. I like a lot of the cast in both films, and it’s easy to see how Magicians might have seemed funny on paper…whereas This Is 40, on the other hand, is so shaggy and plotless it’s hard to believe any of it ever existed on paper. It’s telling when you’re sitting around in your pajamas on a Friday watching a movie and thinking, “Maybe I should have gone to work after all.”
Of course, I did kind of go to work. I sent and answered a whole bunch of e-mails this week, mostly trying to get reviewers looking at a project before I return to the office at the end of next week. I also went back to SUNY Old Westbury briefly yesterday morning, since that seemed easier than trying to schedule a phone call.
And that, more or less, seems to have been my week.