Movies and Such

After a LONG HIATUS from movies seen on the actual big screen, on Sunday I went to a preview of The Secret in Their Eyes, the winner of this years Oscar for best foreign picture. It was at USC and parking on Sunday was bad in a way I had not predicted, so I missed the first fifteen minutes or so, but it was good. The director comes from procedural television, and some scenes felt to me like a well-executed TV scenes--well, maybe just one-- where the detective's boss/love interest comes into an interrogation and they do some good-cop/bad-cop shenanigans. It's the the kind of scene meant--and needed--to turn the plot, but it's weird to watch and recognize it as such. But I think this is mostly a symptom of the way I watch things these days, at this point in my education. I wonder if people in med-school start to go to bars in hopes of picking up a date, but end up thinking about how their ligaments attach, and the state of their arteries as they flirt.

Then Paul and I went to see Greenberg, which he hated because "it was so long and boring", but which I liked "because you like movies where nothing really happens." It's true, nothing does really happen in this movie. I'd call it a character study, or a "slice of life." A really well-crafted portrayal of specific people at a specific point in their lives. And the people were very familiar to me, so I could marvel at the skill of the portrayal.

And last night, I had a reading of my script-in-progress, Children of Others, which was really cool. I've been in a bit of limbo since I turned in the last draft, unable to settle back in or focus, but seeing it read by real actors re-awakened some enthusiasm for the project in me, and I hope to return to it and makes some good improvements. Which I should be doing now, by the way, but I also felt like writing this.