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Hey Gabriel! Have you checked my blog for my account of
Moulin Rouge! at the Paramount on Friday yet? If not, you can jump right to that
here. There, I saved you some time.
Normally I actually would have waited to write about that until today's DLU, this very entry, because I rarely post to this blog over the weekend, and the show was on Friday night. But, I also had the
PCC Ugly Sweater Brunch from Friday to write about, and didn't want all that to cover today when it's my last day before Christmas PTO, and I don't want to be diverting too much of my attention on this today.
That leaves Saturday and Sunday for me to cover today then. I saw two more movies.
I bought tickets as early as I could, for both Shobhit and me, to see
Avatar: The Way of Water on Saturday afternoon. We did this after spending quite a bit of time working on his audition tape in the morning—so much time, in fact, that I had to admit it really was a good thing I never had to go to the post office that morning, thanks to going directly after work on Friday instead. Once he had the files submitted online, he was suddenly very defeatist about it and convinced he won't get the part. Maybe he will, maybe he won't. But at least now he can't put any blame on me for not helping him.
The movie showtime was at 12:15, and we walked down there, arriving about ten minutes into the trailers, which was fine. We could have been earlier but even after he submitted the audition tape we decided to go ahead with our plan to have French toast for brunch, which we made and ate fairly quickly.
The movie is 192 minutes long. That's three hours and 12 minutes. As in a solid half hour
longer than the first one. Shobhit is such a fan of James Cameron, mostly because he created Shobhit's favorite movie of all time (
Titanic), he has a tendency not to believe Cameron can do any wrong. Before we went to this movie on Saturday, he was convinced not only that it will be nominated for Best Picture (that very well could still happen), but that it had a likely chance of winning—something I've known all along is not in the cards. I tried to explain this to Shobhit but he wouldn't listen. And then? About two hours into
The Way of Water, he leaned over to me and whispered, "It's too long."
Later, because Shobhit usually predicts this incredibly well, I asked him what grade he thought I gave it. He actually said, "I don't think it deserves more than B or B-plus but I think you have it a B-plus or A-minus." Funny he should mention that, because when I saw the original
Avatar in 2009 I did indeed give that one an A-minus for
my first review of it. But then I went to see it again this past October for its re-release in anticipation of this film, and for the first time ever I re-reviewed a movie, this time
downgrading it to B+—mostly because of its problematic narrative elements, which were problematic even then and of course have aged poorly. The movie's right plotting structure and action set pieces, however, could not be denied.
And so it goes with
The Way of Water, which largely just retreads the plot of the first film, albeit without leaning as heavily on problematic tropes. Now, it's more just . . . tropes. But, with some of the greatest and most impressive visual effects I have ever seen. Anyway, even I thought the movie was longer than it needed to be, and that more than anything kept me from grading it any higher than B+—even though the effects are so amazing I still came very close to giving it an A-minus.
In contrast to Shobhit, though, I actually was never bored, and the final hour is among the most thrilling I've seen in a movie in a long time. And even at more than three hours long, the movie is packed with details, so much so that I may see it again in a few weeks just so I can absorb more of them.
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We saw the movie at Pacific Place, where I discovered recently they are hosting a second year of floral art pieces for the holiday season called "
Fleurs de Villes NOËL. When this happened last year I really thought it was a one-off, something that travels from city to city and just happened in Seattle that once. I had no idea it was coming back this year, and thus was not part of my initial holiday season plans—and that combined with the 10-photo album for
Moulin Rouge! is the reason I already have
12 photo albums already for this year's Christmas collection. The requisite Christmas Eve/Day album will on its own bring it up to tie with last year's record 13 albums for the season, and I still have multiple other photogenic events to attend. This year is really kind of going over the top, and as much as I really love doing all this Christmas stuff, I honestly hope to chill out from it next year, at least comparatively speaking. The 10 albums each that I had for 2019 and 2020 were a lot! So, next year there are some events I can perhaps skip a year, such as Holiday in the Park or Seattle Center Winterfest. The trouble this year has been both last-minute additions to the schedule, and revisiting things I thought I would skip this year when I discovered friends had never seen them. Hmm, maybe I should just weed out some of my friends! I'm kidding.
In any case, since we were there, I asked Shobhit if we could go around Pacific Place after the movie so I could get photos of all the floral displays. I got
22 photos out of it, and I even captioned them all this morning, several of them identifying the title of the piece and which local florist designed it. I forgot to take a photo of the piece sitting atop the glass overhang at Pacific Place's front doors. I thought I would go back and get a photo of that but I just remembered yesterday was the last day of the gallery run. Shit! Oh well.
When visiting the Fleurs de Villes website, I discovered they're doing a Pride one in Sydney during the dates we'll be there! Well, there's yet one more thing to add to my increasingly endless things to do when we're there. Because the pieces in Seattle were all free to see, as were the Pride ones we had seen in Vancouver last summer for Vancouver Pride (and thus I created a single photo album just for those so I could create a
Fleurs de Villes collection, to which I will later add an album from Sydney), I totally assumed this would be free in Sydney too. But, perhaps not: although
the website for The Royal Botanic Garden Sydney says "Price: Entry by donation," their
own event page for Fleurs de Villes: PRIDE says tickets will be $35 (AUD, so really about $23.50 USD). I still want to go though, so I guess I'll just need to budget for that.
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Shobhit and I walked from there to Pike Place Market, before quickly heading back to Pacific Place when I discovered to my dismay that I had lost one of the orca earrings I had been wearing—I had just bought those in Victoria in June, paid more for them than I had any other earrings, and I loved them. Now, within six months, that's all she wrote. I realized it must have gotten knocked out of my year during the many times I kept taking my face mask on and off as we entered and exited buildings, and I had also taken it off for the photo Shobhit took of me inside
the floral frame. I can't even tell if I had the lost earring still in my ear in that shot, because I am slightly turned and you can't really see my left ear. We went back up there, studied the floor, found nothing. A guy in a group waiting to get photos of their own asked what we lost, and I said, "One of my earrings." He said, "I'll let you know if I find it!" Um, okay. What are you going to do, call me?
We then caught the bus back, and after I wrote my quite long, 1600-word review of
Avatar: the Way of Water, we spent the evening catching up on TV from earlier in the week:
Fleischman Is in Trouble and
Welcome to Chippendales.
Yesterday, late morning, Shobhit and I went out and did some shopping. QFC, MacPherson's Produce on Beacon Hill. He wanted to pick up a book at the Capitol Hill library but we were too early and they don't open on Sundays until noon.
When we came home, I made myself a chai and then settled in for the next three-hour movie I had to review (okay, actually 2 hours and 39 minutes), but at least this one I could just watch at home:
Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, which gets very meta in a kind of insufferable way. It was . . . fine. Also too long. But, whatever. The movie was beautiful to look at.
And then, later, we again spent time watching some TV. We watched the HBO documentary
Pelosi in the House, which I actually found riveting in spite of its transparently subjective adoration of the woman (the film was made by her daughter, using a lot of exclusive home video footage no one else could ever have gotten), and used the January 6 insurrection as its very effective climax. We apparently decided to keep it in documentary mode last night, because we then switched over to Netflix to watch the first episode of
Harry & Meaghan. That one is much slower, being multiple episodes, but still illuminating to me since I never scour tabloids about these people and am happy to hear their story told by themselves.
We could have watched another episode, but then I made the wise choice to spend the rest of the evening writing up my post about what I had done on Friday. I mean, shit. This post is long enough on its own, imagine if I had to combine it with all of that.
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— पांच हजार तीन सौ इकतीस —
[posted 12:32 pm]
