one good movie

Reading’s slower than usual, too many distractions especially of a deadly night-time, and my writing too has been unpardonably slack. Things should improve greatly now that Mat’s back at school, but it’s the evening, always for me a time of indiscipline, that really must improve. I feel that physical fitness just might improve too, with Mat’s help. He’ll never read a book in his life (and I really must accept that, avoid anything snide) and his Weltanschauung probably comes from multiple viewings of ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’ but at least he has a sense of humour and he’s motivated in some areas more than I am. He wants me to turn the carport into a gym once Fiona’s depressing ex gets his stuff out. He forgets I also have a car to park in there, but at least it’s pushing me in the right direction.

As part of health and fitness I had proposed to give an honest account of my food intake, but I keep forgetting or getting sidetracked. I’ll try yet again. Today so far, muesli with fruit-chunk yoghurt. Two toasts, one with pepper-cheese spread, the other with smoked-salmon flavoured cream cheese. Coffee of course. Morning tea, bits of cheese and biscuits. Lunch, muffins (two) with cheese and salami and mayo. A banana. It’s now 4pm.

Mat’s on at us to get DVDs, but he’s gradually I think coming to realise the enormous gulf between my taste in these things and his. A couple of days ago, we hired three films, one for us (Sarah and I – 21 grams), one for Mat (Dude, where’s my car?) and one we all could share (The Core). This last was a very silly piece of sci-fi, with a handful of Yanks (and a token foreigner) saving the earth’s ‘EM’ field by restarting the core, which had stopped spinning. Does the core spin? Fuck knows. Anyway, a total embarrassment, with whales saving the day enfin. More interesting was 21 grams, though Sarah was at first irritated by the complicated time scheme of the narrative. Sean Penn plays Paul Rivers, an unlikely maths prof with a bad heart, or rather two bad hearts, first his own, and second the one transplanted into his chest from a hit-run victim. Caught up in a none-too-functional relationship with his wife Mary (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who seems more interested in conceiving Paul’s child before he carks it than in supporting him in his crisis, Paul becomes obsessed with the previous owner of his newly transplanted heart. Not that we find this out straight away, we piece it together through flashbacks and flash-forwards, and through changes of focus, because there are two other lives that are dwelt on in depth, that of Christina Peck (Naomi Watts), widow of Michael Peck, whose heart now beats in Paul’s body, and Jack Jordan (Benicio Del Toro), responsible for the death of Michael and his two daughters in a hit and run accident. None of these three characters have easy lives: Paul with a death sentence hanging over him, Christina having to face life without the man who saved her from self-destruction, not to mention the loss of her children, and Jack trying to keep body and soul and family together and kick away from a life of crime and desolation.