mushinnoshin

Whilst I wait for a gargantuan file to complete its trek by ftp, lets catch up on a few tidbits from last week’s Vacation-Mini. (I took Thursday & Friday off after the holiday).

Well the main goal was to paint my living room & parlor area. It didn’t get done. But I sorta figured that was overly-ambitious, and the real goal was to get the cable, phone, and network jacks installed in the parlor wall, so that I will then be ready to paint. That part got done, plus I taped up the A/C duct, as you may have inferred from previous posts.

To call my basement ‘unfinished’ would grossly understate the point: my basement is one of those old-school creepy stone dungeons, with earth breaking up through the thin layer of floor cement and a nearly constant puddle of musty rainwater (itself a real problem that I probably need to solve sooner rather than later). While all this would make it an excellent locale to shoot an S&M video, the downside is that it’s a natural haven for spiders.

Which is OK in and of itself, normally if I go down there and see a few, I don’t let it bother me, I figure they’re eating other bugs and it’s all good. But in order to do what I had to do, I had to crawl up onto a ledge into a dank dark corner, roll beneath a main A/C duct, sit up in the darkened pocket on the other side, and then reach around blindly into the completely black crevice on the other side of the the fixture beneath the parlor floor.

Yeah.

So I swept out the area, fogged it, went to lunch, came back and swept again. With all that done, it still creeped me the hell out, but I forged ahead and got it all done without incident. In fact by the time I was running the all the data cables, my confidence was up and I was rolling in and out with reckless abandon.

So by the time the weekend was done I had the cables run, the jacks installed, and the wall patched back up and spot-painted back to the old color, and maybe next weekend I can start the new painting. I still haven’t really decided on my color scheme though.

Other than that, there were a few movies on the agenda: Netflix provided me with Little Miss Sunshine and the House of Flying Daggers, while the Belcourt showed me La Vie en Rose and Paris, Je t’aime.

Not a whole lot to say on Daggers — magnificently shot wushu film, with a terrible and beautifully tragic ending — but ultimately just an entertaining fairy tale like most such films.

On Little Miss Sunshine — I wasn’t sure what to expect. Ridley pretty much panned it, and I generally find his reviews pretty well on target. But then the movie became such a sleeper hit… Well, in the end I don’t think it was as bad as its detractors say, but it certainly didn’t live up to the positive hype. Mainly I just thought it was much funnier when it starred Chevy Chase and was called Vacation.

On La Vie en Rose — nice biopic, not a whole lot more to say than that. I didn’t know much about Edith Piaf, I do know a lot more now — certainly never had any idea she had so much tragedy and strife in her life. I will say that in some scenes she looks so incredibly much like (young pictures of) my Great-Grandmother Ramsey that I still find it hard to believe that the Ramsey part of my tree isn’t French. Oh! Duh, Ramsey is her married name. I should find out what her maiden name was.

The real winner though was Paris Je t’aime — a series of touching poetic vignettes with 18 directors each taking a turn telling a simple love story from the heart of Paris. So many of them were wonderful that it’s hard to pick the best examples. But the very last one was a clear standout — the story of a lonely, doughy, late-middle-aged mid-western woman whose dream was to see the city, a dream that finally came true (save that she couldn’t stay two weeks, having no one to watch her beloved dogs). It was the sort of slice-of-life that was simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting — made more amazing in that she saw it precisely the same way: simultaneous joy and sadness, loved for the glory of feeling alive. Just. Wow.

She told her story in a slow, broken, Americanized French, apparently doing something like a report to her French class, having studied the language for two years in preparation for the trip. When a number of my fellow moviegoers laughed at (no, not with) her, I momentarily wanted to be angry and indignant — how dare these assholes make fun and feel superior? I dare say her French was a lot better than theirs. But in the end I realized it was their loss — if they couldn’t see the beauty of the tragic-turned-to-strength in this simple character, I feel sorry for what they missed.