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great television, crazy cinema
Friday, September 11 2009
September had been dry until today, when clouds piled in, the temperatures dropped about ten degrees, and rain began to fall. At some point in the afternoon I went into the greenhouse to see what the hydrological situation was like. The greenhouse is very dry at this time of year, now that we've had something of a drought (by the standards of this year) and the sun is finally low enough to make a sustained attack through its south-facing glass. The only remnant moisture was in a few cracks in the bedrock lining the sides of the well, whose bottom had gone white with dry rock flour. But when I went down there this afternoon, after several sustained (though not especially heavy) rains, I saw that moisture was already creeping into the bedrock. It was darkening the south wall of the well and causing it to glisten in a few places. That was all. But it meant that water was finding its way two feet into the bedrock after only six hours of occasional rain.
Today Gretchen and I began watching a teevee series (on DVD) called Breaking Bad about a brilliant chemist working as a high school teacher who learns he will soon die of lung cancer. Hoping to raise money quickly, he decides to go out into the desert with one of his burnout students to cook meth. By the end of the opening episode, he and the deadbeat are barreling down a dirt road in an RV wearing gas masks, while a couple of attackers lay incapacitated on the floor, having succumbed to a toxic cloud. If that sounds awesome, let me assure you that it is even better than that. The acting is top notch, the characters are complicated even when utterly mundane, and there's no moralizing. Best of all: the suspense builds in strangely-timed and unexpected ways, sometimes by cutting up and reordering the presentation of the narrative. It's yet another example of how much television has improved over the last ten years.
Meanwhile my Bittorrent-enabled downloading of movies I'd heard of and wanted to see continued. Yesterday I'd downloaded a movie called Rapture, hoping it would be a kooky high-budget dramatization of the Christian end times, with the damned suddenly finding themselves surrounded by the crumpled piles of the outfits of the righteous as they are slurped up into Heaven. But this was something else entirely. Our hero begins the movie as a bored telephone information dispenser by day and a swinger by night. We're less than ten minutes into the movie and she's already in her birthday suit banging some random dude in a manner I can't see a fundamentalist being permitted to watch (even if for purely righteous instruction). Later on, as she picks up the beliefs and jargon of evangelical Christianity, her lines sound increasingly like the ravings of a pod person or perhaps a lunatic, while her atheist friends make the sort of reasoned arguments that I might. And then she does something batshit bonkers and winds up in jail. My doubts that actual Christians had anything to do with the movie grew into certainty that it was anti-Christian propaganda. But then the movie takes a completely nutjob turn for the supernatural and the Rapture really does happen. Whoah! It wasn't a particularly good movie, but you had to give it props for its range of psychological attack.
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