Catch Me If You Can
January 17th 2003 -
Catch Me If You Can
It’s not bad. I was kind-of dreading it after seeing the ad, as it seemed as though it was going to be one embarassingly incompetent impersonation after another – the main character is a habitual con-man, and the ad has one particularly excruciating moment in which he tries to get the other Doctors to concur. Fortunately, the ad was just as deceptive as the main character. Oh, sure, it gives some of the surface details, but the whole film is rather enjoyable and I barely cringed at all. Which is notable, because I cringe easily.
The Shining
I figured that midnight wasn’t late enough to go to sleep, so watched “The Shining” with CB and EG until 2:00am, then staggered into bed. Still, I enjoyed El Shino just as much as I had the first time. The atmosphere is wonderfully, genuinely creepy, in the way that I assumed all horror movies would be before I saw any. Oddly, most horror movies try hard to evoke an atmosphere of normalcy, at least for the beginning, and by the end the normalcy has generally resumed. The Shining was more like Eraserhead.
Greek
I’ve finished the Greek tapes. Well, I’ve listened to them all anyway – the last one needs a bunch of relistens to drive the words into my memory, but I now know their entire scope. Actually, it’s a little bit disappointing. One of the big problems with the tapes was that they had taught me the formal ways of saying things, which don’t tend to get used very much in day-to-day life. Fair enough, for the traveller to Greece who knows nobody there, it may be of minor importance to know the informal phrasings, but in talking with your Greek girlfriend – let’s just say that there’s quite a bit that I’m going to have to relearn because, to Anna’s ears, it has the air of over-polite mockery – the formal forms are very rarely used nowadays, even with strangers, much as it is in in France.