Journalling
Melissa and I got back from Vancouver in the evening after spending New Year's Eve with friends. Went out to watch the movie Doubt which was enjoyable and inspired a lively debate. Set in the 60s, Philip Seymour Hoffman is a priest who deals with his parish school and takes an interest in the situation of their only black student, an altar boy, who is having trouble fitting in, and Meryl Streep is the zealous principal and nun who is concerned that his relationship is secretly more than concern and bids her sisters to keep an watchful eye on the Father. One of the most theatrical films I've seen. I commented half way through^* that I had been seeing each scene from a fixed perspective in my head as if staged for the theatre, something which reached a mental crescendo with a nun coming in from stage left clutching a black and white cat and proffering it to the audience. Doesn't come as a surprise that it would be like this being that it was directed and written for the screen by the same person as wrote the play and who is from the theatre. The non-cinematic quality lessens in the back half of the film, the editing and staging becomes invisible, and I found myself getting into the thing properly. I think the script is a little too unambiguous, which belies the quality of the performances, it being a film where the audience is required to judge the motivations and guilt of the characters based on the same cues and readings as the characters. It definitely becomes a film about reading faces and is slightly spoiled by there being just a few too many words and a couple too many broad strokes.

Yesterday was spent almost entirely in the service of making pizza, which Melissa did almost alone once the groceries were in, though getting the groceries in turned into a three trip ordeal that took all day. Turned out very well I thought, despite the toppings being tabled by a four person committee and ending up ham, pepperoni, mushrooms, green peppers, pineapple and three kinds of cheese. The crust was made with honey. We got up late, made pizza, rounded out the evening playing Cranium, in which I drew a picture of a lift with my eyes closed which turned into an exploded diagram: all the components were there, but none of them were connected. I read a bit before bed, some Lois McMaster Bujold who I picked up because an older, white bearded gentleman saw my standing by the SF paperbacks in the library and launched into a speech about had I read Bujold and that she was good sci-fi and he'd finished her stuff but this book was an omnibus of three of her first stories, before I could furnish a reply he strode off and out the door at high speed. I'd been there to pick up some J.G. Ballard and Gene Wolfe but based on the strangeness of the experience I decided to go with Bujold too. I'm doing the 'great authors whom I have neglected' thing, and will be getting outside of genre soon, after 2008 which I self-consciously devoted to genre. I might have made more of an impression on the endless coalface of books had I not spent hundreds of hours on Bethesda, Bioware and Squaresoft RPGs in 2008. Still, the world enough and time.

^*Yep, I'm a talker at movies, though quietly