Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Viewing Blues

The only thing worse than being sick with the flu is having to sit in a crowded doctor's office for four hours on Monday night while the flatscreen TV on the wall plays, in succession, the final 30 minutes of Bruce Willis in "The Kid" followed by "Radio" and topping it off with "Daddy Day Care".... while you have the flu. At least the TV was a plasma and the attractive woman sitting next to me had a nice sense of humor and agreed with me between sniffles on how unbearable the whole night has been for both of us in this doctor's office. And when in the hell did 'web check-ins' gain precedence over us fine folk who actually walk into the clinic first? But I digress. The only positive aspect of my four day sickness has been the opportunity to drown myself in television. I guess if one has to get sick, there's no better time than February when Turner Classic Movies is running its 31 days of Oscar salute. It's given me the chance to revisit some classic films ("The Last Picture Show", "Treasure of the Sierra Madre", "Stagecoach") and step into some new experiences ("Lovers and Other Strangers", Alan J. Pakula's "Comes a Stranger").

My Netflix queue has also gotten a charge, giving me the opportunity to knock off a couple of selections with little delay. While the choices themselves weren't that great- Marco Bellochio's "My Mother's Smile", another impenetrable film by this Italian director who continually produces pretentious and suffocatingly dense efforts that one needs a roadmap of Italian history and politics to clearly follow, and Anne Fontaine's "Nathalie" which is one of those French films that thinks by placing iconic actors like Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu into a sexually compromising narrative automatically makes for good viewing- its always nice to chip away at the Netflix queue.

And everyone, please, get their flu shots soon. Take it from me, you don't want this.

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