I went to Virginia to get my daughters yesterday, they have been in South Carolina for a week with their Grandparents. We meet in VA because it’s half way between SC and NJ. Traffic was terrible! It was backed up over the the Delaware Bridge and it was backed up for ten exits in Virginia (outside of DC). As I was driving, I listened to my Old Testament Introduction class in preparation for my Old Testament History and Theology class in the fall. Yes, I know, I live an exciting life 🙂
So, what did I do for a week without my daughters? Not much! Just the blogs and studied a little and worked on my Greek. I did discover that I need my daughters to keep me on the straight and narrow since without them, I wind up eating stuff I shouldn’t. If they had been here, I certainly wouldn’t have had an ice cream cone for lunch.
I watched two movies while they were gone: Failure to Launch and Inside Man. Failure to Launch was a silly little movie. A little strange and sappy, very much a formula movie. And I was very surprised to see Terry Bradshaw’s rear end, it seemed pretty out of place in this movie and I’m sure a disappointment to those who would have preferred to see Matthew McConaughey’s rear end.
Inside Man was a movie with a lot of wasted potential. I think if Spike Lee hadn’t directed it, it would have been very good. He is a very interesting visual director and some of his shots are stunning but then the rest are self-aware, plus he has an agenda and writers and directors who have an agenda, are usually propagandists and that makes for boring movies and books. Plus some of the writing had gratuitous racists remarks such as when Denzel Washington referred to Jodie Foster as “mayonnaise pinstripe” (and this was after he reprimanded a police officer for using a racial slur).
But I really like the idea of this movie because it has some interesting elements. It’s about a bank robbery where the robbers deliberately take hostages and the bank robbers have an interesting way to blend in with the hostages so that no one knows who the robbers are. The story jumps forward and back as you see the detectives interviewing the hostages after they have been released. Lee does a great job jumping around, there are times when directors will do this and it gets confusing but Lee handled it very well. And the acting was great. But for such an exciting premise, it really was a slow movie.