Gamesmanship

Focused on Dora with her Elmo Slippers

The FBR was a little under the weather yesterday following her gargantuan Halloween efforts. She and Wingman got through the day with a steady dose of Dora the Explorer. That certainly does it for me as well. She had rallied significantly by the time we caught up with at dinner time. She demanded to see her Great-Grandmother as we tried to explain she was back in Panama. I’m sure a heart will be truly warmed down there when my wife relays that request to her mother. 

Our delayed date night was redeemed last night with Suburbicon. George Clooney is back directing again and tried to deliver a Coen like black comedy but only partially succeeds. It ends up looking like the love child of Pleasantville and Fargo. I love the Coen movies which always feature memorable if fantastically flawed characters. Clooney tries to send up 1950s suburbia and inserts an extremely heavy handed and unnecessary racial plot line. I’m sure he was trying to compare the vivid racism aimed at a very stable African-American household with the rampant shenanigans underway right next door in the Matt Damon home but the two stories distract from each other instead of enhance. The actors are all great, especially Damon as a stalwart Episcopalian who sees his life dissolving around him due to some of his own choices. His son is the audience’s conscience but he’s sadly neglected until the very end. I really liked the Damon story which, while predictable, builds some admirable sequences of Coen-like happenstance into some very funny moments. I left feeling that while I liked the movie it could have been a lot more.

Still Focused

My Favorite Panamanian and I came home to watch the 7^th game of the World Series between the Red Sox conquering Astros and the Dodgers. I love game 7’s, especially when I’m not deeply invested in either team. Part of what attracts me to watching sports is the inherent drama and pressure the players have to deal with which is ratcheted up to maximum levels in a game like this. There were some Herculean efforts from players on both sides while others obviously folded under the pressure. I felt like turning off the announcers because Joe Buck, as usual, tries to be epic but only distracts from the drama unfolding and readily apparent to anyone watching it. I loved seeing the upstart Astros tenuously hold off the overbred Dodgers.

The Bad Cinema project count remains to #49 out of 100, with War of the Planets, a thinly veiled 1970’s Italian rip off of 2001 and Star Wars.