*** finding the entertainment in everyday life ***

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Movies: Atonement & The Loss of the DVR...

Our DVR died. Despite Shelagh being DEVASTED at the loss of our Super Why! collection (it's not in On Demand for some reason, so we had taped a bunch for the kids to watch while I make dinner), it sometimes is a relief when that happens. It happened once before and we had back episodes of a few shows that we were wavering on (24, 30 Days, etc) so it just confirmed that we were done with them which was a good thing.


This time we lost a few eps of Dirt (a guilty pleasure as are most FX shows, but I do like it); We Are Marshall which I was 1/2-way done with; and Reds which we had watched about a 1/3 of and were so-so with anyway. The biggest loss was all the Series we had set up to record. We had to have over 20 set up and b/c we mostly watch TV out of the DVR and not necessarily on the night the shows come on, it took me a bit to figure out what to reset on the new machine (which arrived the next day I am happy to report). I would like to note that we don't watch 20 shows all at once, but rather HBO, Showtime, and FX have shows we like year round for shorter time periods (well that's me rationalizing my TV habit, I guess, but it is what it is). We missed taping Mad Men this week - bummed about that. We are both really enjoying that show - they are replaying Season 1 on AMC now so we're catching up on it and will be back in for Season 2. We were able to watch The Office and 30 Rock online last night. Loved the Jim and Pam stuff by the way. They are really doing a nice job managing that relationship while keeping things light and not focusing whole episodes to it. It's just kind of going on in the background. More Kelly Kapoor please!


Netflix saves the day! We watched Atonement this week and both liked it. I didn't read the book but I generally knew what it was about beforehand. I had read a couple of interviews with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy and was looking forward to seeing both of them in it. It seemed really well cast - the 3 Briony's were all wonderful. The love scene was powerful and intense and the loss was really well played out. That green dress was insanely beautiful...I couldn't stop staring at it...the color, the low back, the draping...it was completely eye-catching. It reminded me of the play of green in Great Expectations (Gwyneth Paltrow/Ethan Hawke), which I thought was an underrated movie by the way. There was something about the director and the color green in that movie and after reading about that it's all I could think about watching it. Kind of the same thing with Atonement...the dress just took over like it's own character. There were a few slow parts in the movie, but all in all I would recommend it.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Great Expectations WAS very underrated! Love that movie. I disagree with you on Atonement though. I was bored and did they really use the C word back then?