White on Blue

Sleeping Moses

Summertime Haircut

Moses the Monkey Dog

Favorite Spaces: National Building Museum Atrium (Washington DC)

I love sitting by that fountain.

Pupatella Food Cart (with a Pizza Upskirt Photo)

My Mom read an article about this supercute food cart in Ballston in yesterday's Washington Post, so we went and had lunch there. The pizza was pretty good: I'd go back. (The crust was nice, the sauce a little bland.) This is especially impressive considering it was cooked in some sort of portable oven.

The high point of our trip wasn't the food, however. When we finally sat down to eat, my Mom said she recognized the folks behind her in line, that they were the parents of an early elementary school friend of mine. So I went up to them and, sure enough, my Mom was right. It turns out my friend is now divorced with two kids.

Cassettes

I'm currently getting rid of a ton of old cassettes. It's hard to say goodbye to them.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)

The world is a quirky place, but this movie is a case study in how not to convey that quirkiness. Instead of letting us absorb the quirkiness of Savannah for ourselves, it consistently tells us of how this quirkiness should strike us: every time some character is portrayed doing something unusual, there's a quick cut to John Cusack's open-mouthed stare.

I've been watching movies directed by Clint Eastwood lately, and I feel like this suffers from a similar problem as "Flags of our fathers": the frame of the movie ends up disrupting the narrative. In this case, the central narrative of the movie, which involves a gay art dealer in Savannah who may have murdered his boyfriend, is framed by the story of a New York writer's interest and involvement in this murder case. We're not allowed to appreciate the case itself; instead, we have to tediously follow the writer around as he's consistently amazed by Savannah's quirkiness. In "Flags of our fathers", we end up following a writer as he investigates his father's involvement in the famous flag-raising photo from Iwo Jima. While these frames may well have been essential to the book versions of each of these stories, in the movie versions I found them annoyingly irrelevant. And simply boring to have to sit through in order to get to the real story.

Nowhere in Africa (2001)

I really wanted to like this movie, but I found it overwhelmingly anachronistic, in an almost endless variety of ways. For instance, here's a silly anachronism that runs throughout the movie: they live on a farm upcountry in Kenya where they adopt a dog that was running wild, but they then take it on walks with a leash. There are much deeper instances of this problem, but that they would overlook such a simple instance is telling.

My real problem with it was that the characters rang false: everything was too simple. They all have incredibly enlightened views on race relations, volunteering to do menial labor on their farm alongside their workers. And they're ultimately unfazed by any of the many horrible things going on around them.

Maybe the book has richer portrayals of their struggles. The story itself is interesting, so I should check it out. I give it four out of ten stars.

Minor location quibble: there's a series of scenes shot at a hotel that's supposed to be the Norfolk Hotel, but it doesn't really look anything like the Norfolk. At least "Out of Africa" bothered to get that kind of stuff right.