Broken Down

Sad Remnant

Christmas came to a screeching halt yesterday for which my liver is thanking me.  Our gallant Christmas tree had limped to the finish line and I spent most of the Patriots’ game defrocking it of ornaments.  Like the Patriots’ it was good to get a day off because they certainly didn’t show up for a meaningless game against Buffalo.  This is the first time I can remember a Patriots team just flat mailing in a game but I was happy to see so many of the best players being rested against a hard hitting team.

Day Off at Gillette

The unseasonably warm weather continued so Buddy and I took the tree out back for recycling operations.  Buddy decided he had to check and see if there were any ticks still in need of a home by venturing into the usually impenetrable brush which has been beaten into submission by our so called winter.  Once the tree was denuded, thanked, and returned to nature Buddy passed a tick screening exam.  It’s always interesting to try and get him to settle down long enough for something like that – especially after he’s just discovered so many new and interestingly remote scents.

Shorn of Locks

My wife and the PanaGal were not interested in my continued vigilance of the last of the year’s Red Zone.  I find I really do miss fantasy football, if for no other reason than it keeps my wife interested and less focused on my lethargy.  I solved this problem by taking them to see Unbroken, the new Angelina Jolie movie about the life of Louis Zamperini. 

I loved the book so this was going to be tough sledding for Ms. Jolie and in the end I don’t think she did an adequate job of capturing the arc of Zamperini’s life.  It was all too sedentary and lacked the uplifting quality of the book.  It’s obvious she fell in love with the character of Zamperini and went with just a straight forward storytelling which lacked the book’s dramatic punch. 

The time in the life boat was as harrowing and gut wrenching as imagined but too much time was spent in the Japanese prison camp.  This left little time to explore what Zamperini did post World War 2.  Zamperini’s life was defined by what he did after all his trials and the movie ends with thirty seconds of newsreel and subtitles explaining that away.  He deserved better from his friend.  It’s always difficult to translate a good book into movie form and Jolie joins a long list of directors who failed in doing justice to the source material.