paddington: who knew?
Low key update today, I guess. I rode my bike home from work yesterday, and Shobhit got off work at 5:30 and took about an hour and fifteen minutes to get home from Northgate -- I honestly started to worry, until I texted him to ask if traffic was really terrible and it showed that he read the text. I was checking to see if he'd read it when he walked in the door. That's a long fucking time to drive all of eight miles. God knows if Shobhit will still be working in that neighborhood when the Light Rail extension to Northgate Mall finally opens in 2021 (the original projection was 2020, what the fuck?), but if so, it will be a godsend for Shobhit. Even though driving would be far quicker without traffic, at rush hour times, even though he'd have to walk half a mile both from home to Light Rail and from Light Rail to his work, the commute would still never take anywhere near as long as 75 minutes. If you assume 10 minutes each for those walks at either end, plus, I don't know, 15 minutes at most on the train itself? That still adds up only to 35 minutes. He barely gets home in that amount of time in his car when traffic isn't particularly awful.
Anyway, we made salad for dinner. Under normal circumstances that might help my weight be lower today, but it was back up ever so slightly this morning. I had a bowl of ice cream before Shobhit got home. Hey, it was hot out and I wanted some! I didn't put any sugar or syrup in my tea today, if that makes up for anything.
When we sat down to eat, I decided we would watch the original 2014 movie Paddington streaming on Netflix. Even though I probably noticed its surprisingly strong reviews (77/100 on MetaCritic) at the time, I still thought it looked kind of dumb and had no interest. But, people still can't stop talking about how great Paddington 2 is -- that movie came out in January last year, and in the intervening time, I've seen plenty of online articles, but also a surprising number of times people have talked about its apparent delights on pop culture podcasts I listen to. It came up yet again in a recent one, I forget which, and it made me think, okay fine, I'll finally take a look at these movies. The sequel's MetaScore is notably higher, at 88 -- an extremely rare score -- but my OCD just can't allow me to see it without seeing the first movie first.
And guess what? Paddington had some surprising delights. I went and looked up Entertainment Weekly's A- review, and pretty much agreed with the sentiment that the movie is refreshingly simple and straightforward, a throwback to a time when movies did not feel they had to be self-consciously sophisticated in order to keep up with the times. Add to that its excellent special effects, and now I kind of wish I had seen the first one in the theatre. Shobhit and I both quite enjoyed it.
The second one is not streaming, but it was pretty easy to get on disc from Netflix, so it's set to arrive in the mail today. We'll almost certainly watch it tonight. I saw online that there are rumors of a third one, and that one, assuming it will also be done well, I likely actually will see in the theatre. I should maybe be a little more cognizant of my own biases when deciding not to see a movie even when the reviews are stellar. (That said, I feel I still have a valid reason for avoiding most horror movies, even when they get good reviews: I don't want to shit my pants, thank you.)
[posted 12:33 pm]