This evening I got introduced to ‘The Truman Show’ … a movie I’ve wanted to watch for years but had never gotten around to.
It’s such a ‘me’ sort of movie.
I.
Shopping in the afternoon for X-mas gifts and the like, after shopping in the morning for some groceries.
In my afternoon trip I encountered the following doppelgängers: Stay-at-home-mom Jamie Lee Curtis, trans-something Paris Hilton, and blonde Danyele McPherson (recently eliminated on ‘Top Chef’). Driving was draining … so much traffic for a small city, indicative not of many people on the roads, but of poorly designed main routes.
II.
As good as — or even better than cocoa roasted almonds?
Cinnamon roasted almonds. They’re crunchy like candy. They’re crunchy. And they’re like candy. They’re lower in calories than the cocoa roasted variety, though I get a gram more per serving.
This bag probably won’t last the week.
III.
Over in ‘The X-Files’ land we had the next episode on the list, the Terry O’Quinn guest-starring “Aubrey,” which is the name of a town, not a person.
It’s disturbing in its simplistic take on nature vs. nurture (coming down bluntly on the ‘nature’ side), but here it comes across as a ‘problem’ only because it’s handled clumsily. It could have been … creepy. It could have been fatalistic or eerie, but instead it was a mere plot device. As in “Excelis Dei” we end with a Scully voice-over, which Ms. S. noted and which then reminded me of how the series began … with Scully’s end-of-episode reports to her higher-ups. But here it seems less like a report for the FBI — a report that may contradict what we’ve seen in a sense, introducing a sense of irony and distrust — than an easy way to wrap up a story without actually finishing/completing the story.
The weakness here is, in a way, that we as the adience and Mulder and Scully as investigators all more or less understand what has gone on, even if we can’t “prove” it … there is no lingering doubt or uncertainty, and the stronger episodes — at least those that aren’t stand-alone-brillant pieces of writing, acting, or directing — leave us wanting, leave us a bit in the dark. They take from us even as they give.
IV.
And we followed up ‘The X-Files’ — after a discussion of post-WWII modern art — with Peter Weir’s 1988 film. The connections to ‘Dark City’ and ‘Cabin in the Woods’ are pretty clear. On the one hand I’m saddened that I hadn’t seen it before/earlier … meaning I’ve been missing out on it all these years. On the other hand having seen it just now I instantly ‘get’ connections to so many other movies.
A blessing of sorts.
No verb necessary.
