First, let me apologize for the recent paucity of blog posts… what can I say? So many blogs*… so little time… Anywhich (as Flea would say), what a beautifully observed film we watched this week! Susanne Bier is not a director who likes to let you walk away feeling like grabbing a Felafel and calling it a day, but After The Wedding was, believe it or not, the lightest directorial offering we have experienced of hers. It would be great to show her original “Brothers” before the Hollywood remake comes out… but that would mean showing it on Thanksgiving Friday.  Hmmm.

*Flea’s blog and MyOldBanana (a work in progress)

The posts that didn’t get written in a timely fashion might have been like this:

Let the Right One In (but keep the nice ones away!)

This hauntingly beautiful Swedish vampire flick was our post-Hallowe’en Hallowe’en special; post-Hallowe’en because Zofi was afflicted with ye olde (newe?) h1n1 the week before (after watching her suffer, I’d have to recommend not catching it… definitely not fun. Thankfully, I managed to ward it off, with a combination of Tamiflu, vitamins, oregano oil, cordyceps and gin!), and we thought it best not to expose our friends to that, even though she was technically not contagious by that point.

Our guests enjoyed some spicy treats and home-made brownies with Pumpkin cream cheese spread.  Sadly, our projector was away for repair, and a the substitute projector really wasn’t up to the task of showing anything but a gray murk in the dark scenes. Ironically, the disc projected was Blu-ray, and would have looked so goooood… nevermind. At least the projector is fixed now, and we got a new bulb for free! Of late I have become something of a letter-of-complaint writer (emailer). There comes a time when the standard of service we’ve been lead to believe is normal just isn’t good enough, and it seems that the squeaky wheel does indeed get the oil, as the old saying goes.

Half Nelson = full house. Ryan, we have your salad bowl.

Ryan Gosling as teacher, mentor, crack smoker. Shareeka Epps as his pupil (or was she his teacher ultimately?).  Half Nelson was the second in our unintentional** schoolroom drama series. We might have one or two up our sleeves, but time will tell. Now there’s a great expression if ever there was one: “Time will tell.” I digress. HN was a great, earthy flick which was somewhat unobviously set in BKNY. Did you notice?

Tangential Trivia: Director Ryan Fleck once hosted a rip-roaring, Patron-sponsored fund-raiser here, and left a wooden salad bowl that often comes out at MovieNight when the popcorn buckets are all dispensed.

**As you might have figured out by now, the MovieNight programme is spontaneously arrived at, with each week’s feature being chosen according to what takes our fancy. It’s better that way, we think.

“Die Welle” is another obscure (at least around this neck of the woods) gem, unearthed during a convoluted bit of net-surfing (you know… one thing lead to another…) It was great to see our house full, and heartening that the director managed to sneak a few laugh lines into this otherwise full-speed-ahead political drama. I know that we must get back to our Dustin Hoffman mini-season, but perhaps we should have a parallel German mini-season too? We can certainly think of a few that would be a pleasure to see here. C’mon MovieNighters… whaddayathink? More Deutsche?

Congratulations to Zofi’s brother Szymon on his graduation with flying colors from Naval Recruit School in Great Lakes, IL. We look forward to serving him up a well-deserved, icy-cold dirty martini on his next visit to MovieNight. Oh yeah… thanks to Kyril for filling in as “Popcorn Girl” while Zofi was away at his graduation ceremony. Job well done!

Let’s face it… more than enough has already been said about Blade Runner. It was a thrill to see it in HD on the new projector. More HD presentations to come!

You might want to skip this paragraph about our experience with HD disc formats, unless you’re a geek too…
Some of you may know that I scooped up a bargain Toshiba HD-DVD player for a mere $70, when the company announced that they were quitting the race against Sony’s Blu-ray (BD).  Prior to that announcement, both technologies had entry-level players available for about $450. By nature, I felt bad for Toshiba, since the evidence pointed to their system being superior to Blu-ray, but that they had simply not been able to throw as much money into it as the giant Sony had… but then I remembered (showing my age here!) how Sony Betamax video tape system had been trounced by the inferior VHS standard and thought;  maybe it’s Sony’s turn to win. The Toshiba player does a great job upscaling standard DVDs to near-HD quality, and it has proved to be a real asset to MovieNight. It’s hard/expensive to find movies in HD-DVD format, and rental is not an option, so a Blu-ray player will be coming soon. In the interim, prices have fallen dramatically. Sony has a good one for $250. Woohoo!

In other news… it has been brought to our attention that the invitation to Blade Runner was rather self-congratulatory in tone, and that I seemed a bit full of myself. Could this be true? I was certainly excited about the return of MovieNight after the last hiatus, and extremely excited to show this movie in its ultimate form, especially if there was the possibility that one or more of our guests might break their Blade Runner “cherry” at MovieNight. What do you think, readers?

Mr. Leigh at his funniest. I found myself weeping with laughter for extended periods of time. We kept the subtitles on for this one… the spoken English would have been rather challenging to many, and to be perfectly honest, I picked up a lot of things that I’d missed before. Since the subtitles were actually intended as captions for the hearing impaired, they carried their own bits of hilarity… you didn’t really need to read that Poppy giggled (Giggles)!

Smoking goes out the window

You know that, as a former smoker, I remember the pleasure of sitting at a bar with a cocktail and a “fag”, but really, how many cigarettes does a person need to smoke in 3 hours? Apparently, for some people, about 10. We’ve been trying to get smokers to ease up, but it’s clear that that’s not going to happen on its own. So… smoking will no longer be allowed at MovieNight. There will be an ashtray and an open window in the staircase, but we’re not planning on putting a monitor out there anytime soon.