let us all talk
As is typical of a Tuesday after a Monday in which I had a ton of stuff from the weekend to report on, today I've got little to offer . . . Well, except that I did watch a movie for review: Let Them All Talk, the HBO original by Steven Soderbergh, which I gave a B+. This was the first time I wrote a review in which I just threw all the old rules out the window, and went ahead and reviewed a movie that was never intended for theatrical release in the first place, and to my knowledge never even played in film festivals. The film festival thing was the technicality I used for reviewing the Steve McQueen "Small Axe" film series, but this movie didn't even have that.
I already wrote about this as part of the review itself, but I just figured: Why not? I may go back to the old rules once theaters are open again, I don't know—honestly my guess is that going forward I'll use theatrical release "as a general rule," but with occasional exceptions, context depending. Part of what made it easy to exclude any direct-to-streaming movies in my reviews was that I was already occupying all my available time with actual theater-going, so that may very well happen again sometime in 2021. For now, however, whether they had ever been originally intended for theatrical release or not, I'm reviewing movies just available streaming or VOD left and right. Why not include a Steven Soderbergh film starring Meryl Streep, Diane Wiest and Candice Bergen? They're all great.
I started the movie almost immediately after finishing my work day, annoyed that I could not watch on my desktop computer because Xfinity insists I be logged in as the primary account holder, which is Shobhit, in order to log into HBO Max there. I actually got the password right, but then it sent an authentication code to Shobhit's phone, and he was at work. Damn it! So, I watched on my iPad. Which was fine, really. I would have preferred a larger screen, but whatever; as the title suggests the movie is mostly just talking anyway. (Idiotically, the app on my iPad never insists I re-login, so it was easy to watch there. I could have mirrored to the TV in the living room via Apple TV but I wanted to watch in the bedroom since Shobhit would get home before the movie finished. The trouble with the desktop computer login is that I am usually logged in as my own account as my primary email address has been with Comcast for ages, which necessitates me being logged in through Xfinity on my account and not Shobhit's.)
Shobhit made magi for dinner. I helped him just a little bit with cracking open peanuts when the movie was done, as he had already done all the vegetable chopping. I then went back and wrote the movie review, after which I took some time to drive to the office to exchange receiving paperwork. I wanted to do it today instead of waiting until tomorrow so that the stack I'll have to work through on either Thursday or Friday is not quite as thick.
I just finished with our twentieth weekly Zoom Office Meetup (19th for me; actually Rebecca is the only one who was at all 20, being the only one who showed up for the Meetup Thanksgiving week), and I had something fun to share with everyone: I made a spreadsheet showing who showed up each week, with totals for both each week and for each person. The people I ordered in number of times attended, which means Rebecca is #1; I'm #2; and Brent #3, with 20, 19 and 14 times attended, respectively. The next three are relatively high attendees as well: Noah (9), Adrienne (8) and Andrew (7). There are eight people who have only joined once, and four who have "stopped by" twice. There's another 5 who have shown up between 3 and 5 times. A total of 23 people have attended ever, which is a pretty good number, probably roughly a fifth of the total office staff.
It was the first time I had occasion to "share screen," in this case to share something uber-geeky that I keep track of. I added points for this week as people came on the call: Rebecca and Noah were both already on when I connected; then Brent joined, then Adrienne and then Katherine. So we had six this week, just as we did last week. All the same people this week as last week, I only just now realized.
I stopped the screen share soon enough, and in fact did so before Adrienne even hopped into the call. She barely had time to say hi and then had to mute herself for a phone call that lasted too long and so she disconnected. I'm still counting her, though. She showed up, that's all that matters! Brent did joke that he might hop on some week just to say "Hi, I want to be counted!" and then hop off, but I told him I wouldn't take cheating.
Anyway, we had plenty of other stuff to talk about too, among other things my request that Rebecca show us her new Christmas Tree, her first ever (she's Jewish) but she got it for her boyfriend since they can't go home to his family for Christmas this year. It was a very sweet gesture and the tree is very nice. I'm actually starting to miss a real, full-sized, live tree for the first time in years, but I don't feel like I can switch it up in good conscience. The artificial tree I have is in perfectly good shape, its very existence is actually bad for the environment as it is, but it would be an even bigger waste now for me not to use it. This is now my seventh year using that tree, tying with the number of years I used the small, planted live Christmas Tree before it which was really dead for about six of them. I still need to come up with novel ideas to do something different in future years though, just to switch things up. Maybe one of these years I'll hang it upside-down from the ceiling . . . except that won't work for the way gravity holds its pieces together as designed. Dammit!
[posted 1:13 pm]