Awake: 4 a.m.
Movies: 5:45 p.m.: Volver (B-); 9:00 p.m. The Lives Of Others (B-)
Food: half a chef salad with low-fat ranch dressing; grilled pork vermicelli noodle bowl with spring roll; two double chocolate chewy Chips Ahoy
Drink: 8 oz. can of Coke*; most of 12 oz. can of Cran-Apple**; half of 12 oz. can of gingerale; 533 ml can of Labatt's Blue; 591 ml bottle of Coke; 591 ml bottle of Dasani water
Gum: 6 squares of Orbit White (Spearmint flavor)
Music/Radio: "Sports Overnight"***, 30G iPod on shuffle
Print Media: Entertainment Weekly, The Onion****, Seth's Forty Cartoon Books Of Interest
TV: none
Conversations: the usual crowd, plus woman in Vietnamese Restaurant who talked about how she used to enjoy going to "the fillums," but now her leg hurts and all the fillums are about dysfunctional families anyway
Bedtime: 2 a.m.
*My flight left at 6 a.m., so I needed a quick burst of caffeine and sugar to fortify me on the 40-minute drive to the airport. Consequences–like heartburn, gas, bad breath, the jitters–be damned!
**This is my first time flying since the new regulations about bring your own drinks on the flight were enforced. They're tired of these motherfucking snacks on these motherfucking planes!
***Who calls into a sports talk radio show at 4 a.m.? Long-haul truckers? Night watchmen? Whoever it is, they all seem to think that Dallas is going to beat Cincinnati in this year's Super Bowl.
****I'm not just being a company man. I've got a complementary subscription to the print edition, and I often let them stack up and then read a whole bunch at once. As of the end of my first flight, I'm caught up through June. (And of course I'm always careful to turn the Savage Love page toward the window, lest I freak out my plane-mates.)
Notes on the fillums: Pedro Almodovar's Volver is a little below par in comparison to recent run of fine, restrained-but-heartfelt melodramas–a run that some date back to All About My Mother, though I think The Flower Of My Secret and Live Flesh are peak efforts. The title, roughly translated, means "to come back," and the movie's about a handful of women–including the surprisingly superb Penelope Cruz–dealing with the figurative and literal ghosts that re-enter their lives. The plot's soapy by design, complete with murders and betrayals and terrible secrets, but Almodovar doesn't do enough with it, aside from loosely stringing together a handful of incredible scenes. One of those–Cruz singing a yearning song into the night–is just about worth the price of admission, though the relative flatness of the surrounding material is kind of a let-down. … The Lives Of Others went from zero to must-see in the length of time it took for positive buzz to build out of Telluride, and in his intro of the film, TIFF commandant Piers Handling essentially called it his favorite film at this year's fest, and the best debut film he'd seen in a decade. Frankly, I'm not feeling it. There's a great story here, about an East German secret policeman (hauntingly played by Ulrich Mühe) whose surveillance of a politically iffy playwright prompts some inconvenient attitude adjustments. But first-time writer-director Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck's actual storytelling is pretty choppy, and his style is mainly functional and flair-less. This would've made a heck of a twisty thriller in the hands of someone like Brian DePalma or even the Coen brothers, where the political implications of everyone's behavior would be subtext, and not typed out in bold. As with Volver, there's a lot to like here, but there's too much spoon-feeding going on.