— पांच हजार दो सौ छियानवे —
Last night was Action Movie Night at The Braeburn, my fifth this year and my first without Shobhit joining me—because he's in India right now.
The guy who got to choose the movie this week was named Chris, the newer one of two Chrises; it was this one's first time getting to choose the movie though. It was an interesting, if ultimately mediocre in my opinion, choice:
District B13, a French film from 2004 co-written by Luc Besson. The film is set in what was then the near-future of 2010 (ha!—the setting alone is 12 years ago), in a Paris so crime ridden that the police literally wall off the worst neighborhood (hence the title) and just leave it alone to its crime and drugs.
It did have plenty of action, I'll give it that. Lots of foot chases involving a lot of parkour. Its rating on MetaCritic is 70, which I'd say is fair, and fairly suited to a casual "Action Movie Night" audience with pretty middle-of-the-road movie opinions. No need for much in the way of emotional investment as it's just a night to get together and enjoy a movie together, so it works fine. Furthermore, in Chris's defense at least, this made the fourth out of five movies now that I had not already seen before. I honestly would never have expected that, especially considering
the full history of the movies they have watched over the past ten years.
The more interesting thing about last night, actually, was just the experience of being there without Shobhit for the first time, and the couple of people I had genuine conversations with. I have a tendency to be a bit of a wallflower, but Tony, the longtime organizer of this event who also happens to be our neighbor on the fourth floor on the side opposite from Alexia, tends to go out of his way to chat with me a little bit. I recently emailed him
the link to my movie review blog, specifically the tagged history of "best & worst" end-of-year lists that include a log of every movie each year that I have reviewed. After seeing his Excel sheet with the Action Movie Night history, I thought it might interest him, and it did: just a few days later he actually replied, writing,
This is gold and is now bookmarked. I'll be going through this for years to come. So that was nice.
But then, there was a young guy named Sean who struck up a conversation. I had made a take-and-bake pizza to bring as my food contribution (sliced into eight slices, but I was still surprised the entire thing got eaten, as I came and there were already two other pizzas there), but arrived a minute late, with nearly everyone else there already arrived. All the tall chairs around the island counter were occupied and most people otherwise kind of crowded around it, so I had taken my two slices of pizza to sit on one of the soft chairs closer to the fireplace in that community kitchen. A while after Sean was done eating, though, he got up and asked if I wanted to sit there; I said I was fine. But, he came over and struck up a conversation, first asking after Shobhit and then, after I spoke about how often I go see movies and my experience with MoviePass, we wound up talking quite extensively about movies.
This guy is very young, easily born in the nineties at the earliest and quite possibly even after the turn of the century (ugh); all I know is he confirmed he was not yet born when the original
Top Gun was released, and that was 1986. I actually just found his Facebook page to try and find out his age (I could have just asked him but it didn't quite allow for an organic interjection into the conversation, which is fine) but he doesn't list it, dammit! All I can say for sure is he's much, much younger than I am.
And he was super friendly, very conversational and approachable; I would even go so far as to say he was a really sweet guy. But, our approaches to cinema are clearly not aligned. He openly enjoyed
Jurassic World Dominion, for instance, whereas I thought it was
basically a turd, by a wide margin the worst movie in the franchise. He doesn't think critically at all when watching movies, a fact freely illustrated by his consistent response of "That's a good point" when I would say why I didn't like something. Of course, people like him are the very target audience of franchise movies of this sort: they don't go in looking for intellectual stimulation, only entertainment. And there really isn't anything wrong with that.
To Sean's credit, he has three movie choices on the history now and two of them are respectably unusual and good movies:
MidSommar (not super popular among the group, he said; one person left) and
Sorry to Bother You. Another one, called
Gamer, I had never heard of but stars Gerard Butler and has a Metascore of 27 so clearly I didn't miss anything there. But, two out of three isn't bad.
The headcount otherwise last night was slightly fewer but still comparable to other weeks: I counted 11 people there this time. The theater seats 14 so that left only 3 empty seats, and I sat in the one last empty seat in the four-seat front row.
There was one guy who was new since I've been coming, but seemed well known by the others. We never had a formal introduction and I never introduced myself, so I still don't have a clue what his name is. He was clearly older than most of us, gray hair, large belly. Friendly enough: he brought Japanese whiskey to share. I declined the offer he did make of that for me, only because I had already brought my own hot apple cider spiked with Irish Mist honey whiskey. Other people present whose names I remember are Chris (the other one); Ben; Derek; Jake. There were others but I still haven't learned their names. There was one Black guy who was clearly around the same as and a friend of Sean's; I even wondered if they were roommates. (They both gave off a strong "straight guy" vibe, so there's no need to even wonder about that.)
— पांच हजार दो सौ छियानवे —
— पांच हजार दो सौ छियानवे —
It's like I achieved a miracle this week: my work email inbox is down to six messages, almost certainly less than I've had in there since before the pandemic. Two of them aren't even work related, actually; they are reminders about personal things that I sent myself some time ago. So if you don't count those, my work email inbox is now down to four emails. Are you jealous? I bet you are!
Granted, there have been 21 other emails that came in this morning alone, at least as of this writing, but I already worked through them. I realize I won't always be able to get through that many of them this quickly. It's just a great feeling to get the emails down to four at any point at all.
I even almost started to worry about this yesterday. Am I running out of things to do? Having Amy around, who has taken several time-consuming things off my plate, is a big factor here. So is this being an extra week in a five-week promotion month. Still, this does not often happen even under those circumstances. And then, of course, I think of other things I can do—the kinds of things I was constantly putting off on the past because I didn't have time to get to them. One of those things used to be typically long lists of new items for the Mercantile department, but last year that was all shifted to Health and Body Care, so that largely unburdened me as well. I wonder how much of this is just some sense of seniority and cutting me some slack due to my long tenure here? I doubt it's much; other people around here are overworked. I just continued to live a charmed life.
— पांच हजार दो सौ छियानवे —
In other news, I'm actually leaving work today at 1:00. Danielle and I made plans some time ago for this, as she's coming up from Renton, will park in our parking spot in the garage, and then we're taking the Kitsap Fast Ferry to Kingston and back. We'll have just under two hours to hang out in Kingston. We had to make the plan for a weekday since they ended their summer hours at the end of last month and, to my disappointment, that meant no more ferries on Saturdays until spring. (If and when I finally go stay the night with Claudia in Port Orchard, I'll have to go over on the vehicle ferry to Bremerton now, if I go on a Saturday.)
The bummer of this is the horrible air quality due to prolonged wildfire smoke at the end of an extended summer:
worst major city in the world at present. Danielle and I will likely both wear N95 masks just out in the air, this time because of smoke rather than covid. (I never wear masks outside for covid protection as the risk is minuscule.)
For a hot minute I thought we dodged a bullet because the rain we're expecting this weekend,
more than in the past four months. I'm now reassessing that mindset, though, because a wet day would not prevent me from going ahead with the plans today, and it would be more pleasant than breathing a thick haze of wildfire smoke. Blech.
— पांच हजार दो सौ छियानवे —
[posted 12:31 pm]
