We decided we're not going to Antigonish tomorrow. Josh isn't feeling well and Andy has about a zillion rooms to clean up, so we're going to go on Thursday.
Scott Joplin – This was the first I've seen Billy Dee Williams outside of Star Wars. He puts down a believable and spirited performance as Scott Joplin, famed African-American composer and pianist.
I was intrigued and amused by the scenes of his playing in the bordellos. I wonder if they were as flamboyant in real life as they are in this movie. Sadly, the life isn't without its problems – it seems so close to heaven, yet the shadow of syphilis looms over everything.
I'm glad to have seen this movie, because I had no idea who this person was. Still, it takes some liberties. Read the Wikipedia article on Scott Joplin himself and you're left wondering if this film is to Joplin what Amadeus is to Mozart. The real Joplin was married three times – here we only see his first wife. In addition to Treemonisha, whose content wasn't mentioned, there was another opera, A Guest of Honor, that he saw produced but whose score has been lost. Julius Weiss taught him free of charge, though it's true that his mother allowed him to play the piano while she cleaned.
I enjoyed the movie though I think it could have been a little 'geekier' in terms of its adherence to the real details. There are also some parts where it's hard to make out the dialogue – when I'm watching a movie, I hate having to wonder about what's being said, and I often resort to turning on the subtitles or captions (if no one else is around – many people seem to have a hate-on for them). 7.
Tuesday
I went to the library and did pretty well – I found the first two Bourne movies and a copy of Unseen Academicals, one of two Discworld novels I started but didn't finish because life (the other is Hogfather). The Bourne DVDs and some other were donated and aren't in the database yet – they and some others were German-market DVDs and are Region 2 but they'll play on my laptop. I can't find region-reset firmware like I did for my old laptop's DVD drives, but I hope LtnRPC will work to reset my allowed region changes.
We had some fried food at Josh's and then we went back to Andy's and while he cleaned out the workshop a bit, I rescued a computer. Apparently it had been beeping. Could be bad RAM or a bad socket. I moved the single stick over the other socket, and everything worked.
I was going to watch the All-Star Game tonight but Andy found a movie on Netflix that he wanted to see, and I was interested in it too. It's a Korean compilation called Doomsday Book.
First and foremost, I love how realistic the TV segments are in all three pieces. Well... realistic and also absurd, but in a way that's believable.
#1, Brave New World: The best zombie-related thing I've ever seen. There was great humour, palpable fear, some really hot Korean makeout action, and a Korean spin on the trope of the clueless authoritarian parents (you know, like the first Transformers movie in the current series). Zombies have been done to death, but this is vital and different enough to be well worth watching. 8
#2, Heavenly Creature: It's about a robot at a Buddhist temple. Really good stuff, but I can't say much about it without giving it away. 8.5
#3, Happy Birthday: A girl brings about the apocalypse. Andy came up with an idea about what it all meant. The newsdesk segments in this one are literally laughably ridiculous. 7.5
Each of the movielets has a really bizarre final note. It's like they could have ended them just short of where they did, and everything would have made some sort of sense. But then they toss in some symbolic moment at the end, and you're left wondering what it all means. I kind of like it – it might be a good theme for a sequence of short stories. The first and the last were more satisfying that way than the middle, even though the middle movie was the most meaningful overall (add “to me” on both clauses if you feel the need).
When we'd gotten the fried food at Bud's, I kind of met someone whom I realized later I'd seen on OkCupid. While I'm not ashamed of that, sometimes you feel like the world is just a little too small, in that you don't have to experience rejection just once – sometimes, you get to face it over and over again.
One girl on Facebook that I've been interested in recently posted that she took as a sign she picked the right boyfriend his impressive wine and book collection. You can understand how my overwhelming feeling was arggh. After the basic envious rage subsided, I felt like, if you don't have property, you have no business getting laid. But I know I'm misjudging her and I'm not looking at myself in the mirror – if a girl I was into had those things, it would make me feel better about playing boyfriend/girlfriend™ with her, but would it make me more attracted to her? Would it make me love her more? Um, maybe? But for me the overwhelmingly important thing is to get going with decent people you click with. Everything else is distant, though if they're in accord with what our bullshit culture deems appropriate, that does offer a tangible sort of encouragement.
I guess it's freeing in a way that I can't play boyfriend with all the accessories and accoutrements – I can't afford to. So everyone who would want me just for my raw ability to play is off the table. And I'll look in the mirror on this, too – I've been guilty in the past of “looking for a wife”. I think I've changed my attitude significantly, but I feel like many women are looking for a husband – just as ridiculous, but they can get away with it.