The Christmas week is
heading inexorably to its all too soon conclusion as we enter the last day with
at least one of the kids in the house. I
took another day off from work yesterday to spend it with my daughter and son
in law and we filled it with a typical pursuit – yet another holiday movie.
We went to see The Wolf of
Wall Street which is the latest Scorsese and Dicaprio effort. It purports to tell the story of immoral Wall
Street schemer Jordan Belfort and doesn’t skimp on the debauchery that
permeated his life. The movie includes
three hours of excessive sex, drugs, and criminal over indulgence (yep – a real
holiday movie!). I kept waiting for the other
shoe to drop where he pays for his crimes but that is kind of glossed
over. I think Scorsese is at that point in his
career that no one can tell him to pull back a little, one of those “cloth-less
emperor” type situations.
The movie itself is pretty
entertaining as we see the main character careen through his excesses along
with his merry bunch of idiotic enablers.
If we needed another reason to hate Wall Street this movie more than
provides that. All of the acting and direction
is top notch although Dicaprio is kind of uneven; so good in some scenes and
less so in others. If you don’t like
nudity, swearing, drug use, and general bacchanalia then don’t go see this
movie.
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| Son in Law and Daughter With Zorba's Pizza |
We thankfully didn’t have
the wife along for this cinematic adventure for the reasons listed immediately above. She was swallowed up again with a shopping adventure
with a fellow member of the Panamanian Mafia.
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| My Date and I at Zorba's |
She did return in time to
escort us all to Zorba’s for our final pizza of the week. This marked the end of my well spent keto
vacation. I’m almost afraid to check the
scale as I come to the end of my own week of excess (calories and carbs, don’t
you know).
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| The Eye Glass Switch |
We had such a good time at
Zorba’s and at some point decided to switch eye glasses to see what my wife and
I looked like with my daughter’s and son in law’s glasses (it made sense at the
time!). The consensus was that I looked like
Martin Scorsese (I don’t think this was meant as a compliment). These are fun people to hang out with and that
is going to make today’s departure even more painful.
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| Buddy Failing at Lap Dog Status |
We returned home for yet
another movie which didn’t lessen the banter that continued throughout. Buddy tried once again to masquerade as a lap
dog with limited success. I even got a
revenge photo bomb on my son in law who unadvisedly dozed off for a while. The entire day passed much too quickly for my
tastes. I could have used another
sixteen or seventeen hours with this bunch.
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| Revenge for Christmas Night Bombing |
Just before Christmas I
finished off my latest Brad Thor thriller, Blowback. This followed the continued career of his
intrepid counter-terrorist par excellence Scot Horvath. He has to disappear under cover because a
ruthless US
Senator wants to ruin him. While he’s on
the run he manages to save the country again by thwarting a plot by a resurgent
Ottoman Empire using a biological weapon that came from Hannibal
(elephants over the Alps guy not the serial
killer).
I’ve really come to enjoy
Thor’s books as the action is relentless and Horvath is a pretty cool dude. My
lone problem is that I become so engrossed in the action that I literally burn
through the book and read it so fast that I’m sure I’m missing something. I guess that means these are pretty good books. I think by the time I’ve made my scorched
earth passage through the Horvath series I’ll have to go back and re-read them;
just for a better sense of what I like about them so much.
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