Birthday Recap

Thanks everyone for all the birthday wishes. I did most of my celebrating last week, so I was afraid the day itself would be anticlimactic, but now I feel so loved!

I found myself a slice of double fudge cake at a neighborhood bakery (that may soon become my favorite hangout place when the weather gets cool enough to walk there -- it's too dangerous for me to let myself drive there. I'd outgrow my jeans fast). Then I found a few movies at Blockbuster, and I got home just before we got hit with a nice rainstorm that dropped the temperatures, so that at 4:30 in the afternoon it was 75 instead of 105. I opened the blinds and watched it rain while I watched movies.

I didn't find exactly what I wanted in a movie, no real romantic comedies in the vein of what I wanted, which was something along the lines of Four Weddings and a Funeral but without Andie McDowell and with a better ending (I usually stop that movie before the fourth wedding when I watch it). But here's what I did get:

The Truth About Love which the box billed as a romantic comedy, but which was really neither. Still, it was British, and it had Dougray Scott in it. It was supposedly a love triangle in which a guy secretly pined over his best friend's wife, and meanwhile her efforts to prove to her cynical sister that her husband is faithful backfire and prove her husband not only has a mistress but is willing to cheat on both his mistress and his wife. But the movie was mostly about the discovery that her husband is a cheat, and then oh yeah, she later figures out that her husband's best friend is really hot, so there wasn't really a sense of developing romance there. I now want to steal the basic concept and rewrite it to make it really good. The big downfall was the fact that the wife was played by Jennifer Love Hewitt, "acting" in an "English accent" that sounded like Eliza Doolittle in the scene in My Fair Lady where she goes to the races right after learning to speak properly, and everything she says is so slow and carefully, consciously modulated. I kept expecting her to say, "How kind of you to let me come." (She's on my list of people who must have made a deal with the devil to have the degree of fame she has without any real talent or any measurable success. I used to live in fear of her being cast as Katie in a movie based on my books, but fortunately she now has a series, so she's not available for the TV series based on my books.) Still, there was pretty scenery, plus Dougray Scott in a kilt in at least one scene and using his Scottish accent (and now I want to re-watch Enigma).

Junebug -- I'd heard a lot about this movie, so maybe my expectations were too high. Amy Adams stole the movie and deserved the Oscar nomination, but the effect was that everyone else sort of blurred into the background and became less interesting in comparison. It was a movie full of great little moments, but I'm still not sure how it all added up. Maybe I'm just too much "commercial" girl instead of "literary" girl and have too great a need to have everything all tied up, but it seemed like all the characters should have been affected in some way by the major, life-altering event that happened, but it felt more like they just drifted along. I'll have to listen to the commentary track to see what I was supposed to get out of it. What I'd love to see is a whole movie about Amy Adams's character. Actually, that would make for a great romantic comedy, if that character decided to ditch her useless husband and showed up on her ex-brother-in-law and sister-in-law's doorstep in Chicago, determined that she was now going to be all smart and sophisticated like her sister-in-law (only maybe wearing a little more eyeshadow). Heck, if I could write screenplays or had any ambition in that area, I'd write a great leading role in a romantic comedy for Amy Adams to play so she could lead a movie instead of always playing the sister or the temporary love interest. She's my candidate for the next "America's Sweetheart" that Meg Ryan seems to be giving up (except when her serious movies bomb and she then jumps back into romantic comedies) and that Reese Witherspoon may give up now that she's got an Oscar.

In Her Shoes -- I'd sort of overdone it on movies by that point, so I only watched a few minutes and will pick up on it later.

I was going to do a list of some of my favorite (and not so favorite) romantic comedies, but I have to sing at a funeral today, so I need to get ready and leave. No sympathies are needed. It's not someone I knew. She was the wife of a former pastor at my church from before the time I started going there, so they've asked the choir to sing. As a person with a flexible schedule, I'm useful for that kind of thing. Maybe I'll do my list tomorrow.