Alright. I've been thoroughly enjoying my first few days of vacation. After a long, looong time, I finally feel healthy again - I visited the doctor in Mainz the day before we left for break and got some antibiotics against my sinus infection/vicious cold. I think the combination of sleeping more than 6 hours a night and not having to walk around the campus in the rain made these antibiotics much more effective than the ones I took a week and a half ago, and praise goodness, I feel so much better now! I'm done with being sick. Yaaaay!
Along with copying old homework assignments and making long lists of theorems, lemmas, and corollaries for all of my classes, I've also got down to some serious movie watching since break began. The second night we were here, C and her mother and I all sat down to watch the Muppets Christmas Carol. It was the second time I've seen that movie, and I really think I need to start watching it every Christmas. :)
The day after that, C and I snuggled into our bed rather late at night and watched The Fugitive, which I had never seen. To be honest, the only connection I had with the movie is that in an episode of Scrubs, my favorite TV show, one of the characters finds out that another character (The Janitor :D ) was in The Fugitive. He's only in the movie for about thirty seconds (very close to the end) as a policeman who gets shot and dies, but still! I wanted to watch the movie for those thirty seconds, but then, of course, I got hooked! I thought it was a really well made, fantastically understated movie. Definitely a lot of fun!
Then, two days ago, Claudia and I decided to drive to a nearby city here and treat ourselves to a double feature - Jane Eyre and (I know how weird this sounds) Carnage. Now, I think Jane Eyre is a rather well known book to the audience of this blog, so I won't say too much about it. I was impressed with that film as well - impressed that it didn't fall into the nice, all organized and pretty box we have lately for films like Pride and Prejudice. It was also understated and intuitive and engaging - way more than I had expected. The story itself isn't as much of a "happy ending" story as Pride and Prejudice and I haven't read it recently enough to be able to compare it critically to the movie, but from my non-expert point of view, it was well done.
Now to the last movie - Carnage. In German, the movie was called "Der Gott des Gemetzels", but it had nothing to do with Carnage or Gemetzel! The movie premise is thus: two boys are arguing with each other at a playground, one shoves the other, the other shoves back, one insults the other, the other responds by hitting him with a stick that he had in his hand. Now, the parents of each of those boys decide they need to meet and discuss what happened and whether their sons need to apologize, etc. The cast: parents of the boy who was hit with the stick: Jodi Foster and John C. Reilly (you may remember him as Mr. Cellophane in Chicago) - she's an author and very much into art, he's a household supplies salesman. The parents of the boy who hit the other: Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet - the lawyer (currently trying to deny charges about a faulty drug from a pharmaceutical company) and the investment banker.
That's the entire cast. What starts as the most uncomfortable and tense cup of coffee in the world at the beginning of the film eventually dissolves into name calling, swearing, destroying cell phones, and all other kinds of childish behavior as their own issues with themselves, their husbands/wives come rocketing to the surface. About 40% of the time, I wanted to leave the theater because it was so uncomfortable with all the tension, and the rest of the rest of the time I thought the movie was absolutely brilliant. Definitely worth seeing.
I'm gonna go back to enjoying my vacation now. See you all again soon!
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