Dinner and two movies

Taking full advantage of Sylvain being at Scout camp, Chuck and I decided to spend yesterday an hour away in Grand Rapids furniture shopping and going to dinner and a movie. Sylvain is in need of a desk and a new chest of drawers, since his old one is press-board and a couple of the drawers have disintegrated. Plus, we're starting to price out a sectional for the den with the hopes of finally getting rid of the post-garage-sale futon Chuck found that currently serves as a sofa. We're pretty sure what sectional configuration we're looking for, so it's down to playing the "too squishy vs. too firm" game, and picking out fabrics. We ended up being able to eliminate the pieces we tried out, so the search continues....


I've been wanting to see the new movie "Moon" on the big screen, and (of course) it wasn't playing anywhere in the Lansing area, but was at the Rivertown Celebration Cinema in Grandville. In the movie, a mining base has been established on the far-side of the moon, supplying the Earth with helium-3, which provided a clean energy source and saved us from our current energy crisis. The base is manned by Sam and companion robot Gerty (voiced in deadpan splendor by Kevin Spacey). Sam is on the tail-end of his three-year contract and is more than ready to head home. Then, things start to go wrong. I'll stop here with the plot for fear of giving anything else away, but let's just say that there was enough stuff to talk about that it sustained Chuck and I thru the majority of a 3-hour dinner at Bar Divani afterwards (note that the duration was on our part, not the restaurant's).

I liked this movie and would definitely recommend it. The movie was the feature debut of David Bowie's son, Duncan Jones. That aside, I really enjoyed the detail of the movie. The track that Gerty moves along; the grime present on Sam's spacesuit; the labeled take-out containers of freeze-dried beans; the sheer boredom of Sam's job, leading him to talk to his plants, whittle a replica of his hometown, watch old episodes of "Bewitched", and become an ace ping-pong player. I loved it how he watches old episodes of "Bewitched". This movie has just been released for a limited run, but when it's available on video giving more folks the chance to watch it, I'd love to talk about it more.

And, as for dinner at Bar Divani -- where else can I get little 2 oz. tastes of great wine and have a plate of cheese, fruit, and crackers for dinner?!? Chuck had a fairly large bowl of steamed mussels and some sort of braised beef. By the time we left, the rest of the Heartside section was coming alive, and if we didn't have the drive home, would have been tempted to hop around to the other wine bars a bit. So, we had a pretty fun Saturday.

Before I go, I'd also like to mention a movie I saw on the small screen Friday night: "Let the right one in". Yes, it's another "romantic" vampire movie (that is, if you consider love between two 12-year-olds romantic). It's a Swedish film about a boy named Oscar, who lives in an apartment building and gains mysterious new neighbors when a "father and daughter" move in during the middle of the night. The "daughter" Eli befriends Oscar while hanging out in the apartment's courtyard one night. She quickly warns him that they "shouldn't be friends"; which he ignores, and solidifies their friendship by teaching her Morse code so that they can communicate through the apartment walls. (Is some of this sounding somewhat familiar, fellow Twilighters?) An additional plot point is that Oscar is bullied by schoolmates, and Eli encourages him to stick up for himself. Meanwhile, Eli does live off of human blood, which is brought to her by her companion Hakan. Hakan seems somewhat incompetent at his "job", which makes me wonder how they paired up in the first place. I'll stop here with my description other than to say that I really enjoyed this movie and am thinking about adding the book to my reading list as I've read that there are some other interesting parts that didn't make it into the film. If you're a fan of vampire-lore, then you'd enjoy this one; there is some blood, but it's not scary -- this is, after all, a love story.