weekend shorts
Hmm, I wonder if I can update you on my weekend without turning this into the typically overlong Monday post? I think I can. Let's do it!
It was pretty much an all-movies-and-TV, all-the-time weekend. Friday I took myself to see the 2019 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts; yesterday I took myself to see the 2019 Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts; probably tomorrow evening I will see the documentary shorts (which are, on average, much longer). They are all playing at the AMC Seattle 10 in the U District, which was the same theatre the Oscar nominated shorts played at when it was Sundance Cinemas (2012-2017); ditto Landmark's Metro Theatre before that (1989-2012). With all those changes just within the past decade or so, it's nice that at the very least AMC retained Sundance Cinema's 21+ with alcoholic beverages available, although I was bummed when they took away small meals like pizzas and put in the stupid AMC soft drink machines. But, whatever.
I had to make yesterday the day I saw the live action shorts because the showtimes for those are completely unworkable for me on weekdays -- either way too early or way too late, which is annoying. So that's why I chose the animated ones first on Friday, and then hope to get the documentaries -- which they did not used to show in the same theatre, or sometimes at all, several years ago -- tomorrow.
So that leaves the Braeburn Condos Double Feature with Laney on Saturday, which Shobhit watched with us: Airport and Airport 1975, a couple of disaster movies that basically ushered in the modern era of disaster movies. I guess Airport was the second-highest grossing movie of 1970 (behind Love Story), and considering how many millions -- sometimes billions -- die in typical disaster movies these days, it's kind of amazing only one person dies in that movie. It also takes way too long for anything meaningful to happen, but it was still fun to watch both movies with hindsight in context. (Those movies are pretty blatantly sexist.)
So, sometime soon we will do a double feature with the rest of the four-movie franchise: Airport '77 and The Concorde: Airport '79. After all these years of citing Airplane! as the funniest movie ever made, I can't believe I never realized how heavily that parodied just these specific movies (but especially Airport 1975), so we'll probably watch that one again as well soon enough.
I'd actually had the Braeburn Condos theatre reserved, but, even though Netflix had estimated the discs would arrive in the mail on Friday, they did not. So, I had to rent Airport from Amazon and watch it streaming in our living room instead. Luckily the mail arrived early enough on Saturday that I did not have to rent the sequel, and Laney and Shobhit were so comfortable with the kitties in the living room, we all just watched both movies in the condo.
Beyond all that, besides cooking meals, Shobhit and I just watched a bunch of TV: episodes of Will & Grace or Cheers here and there; then the first two episodes of the new Netflix series Russian Doll on Saturday night. I declared then that I was liking it but wanted a break because I could only take so much of the repetition -- but then on Sunday morning we binged through all six of the rest of them. I was quite pleased with the whole thing, but Shobhit and I agreed the show would be best as just that one season; any second season could not possibly be as good. Just think of it as a three and a half-hour movie. (Episodes averaged a little less than half an hour each.)
. . . Woops! Guess what I just did? I finished my lunch of leftover lentils and rice from what Shobhit (and I, a little bit) made for dinner last night, came back to my desk -- and promptly got back to work without bothering to post this!
I am remedying that now.
[posted 1:14 pm]