The cool weather's finally arrived. I've started wearing sweaters again, though I don't really need them yet. Yesterday my Monday afternoon memoir piece group met in person for the first time in a while. We sat in Sylvie's back yard, where she'd lit a bonfire in an outdoor stove to keep us warm!
I'm about halfway through The Count of Monte Cristo. I've now started reading Essential History of the Crimean War for my History Meetup. I could only find it in Ebook form, so when I'm on the subway I'm reading The Loom of Languages, which has some big word lists for Greek and Germanic and Romance languages.
Three weeks ago I showed There Will Be Blood in my Friday historical movie watch party--or would have, but I forgot that my computer's regular DVD player didn't work in Zoom sharing (no picture)! Now I have the VLC app which does work, and I'm showing the movie again this week. Just as well that I'm seeing it again, since parts of it confused me, like Paul Dano playing twin characters. They could at least have given one of them a moustache or glasses or something so we could distinguish them more easily, but maybe they wanted to make it more "challenging"...
The other week Debbie and I had lunch at the Indian buffet restaurant Aroma. I ate so much that when I got home I had to spend the rest of the afternoon in bed! Maybe next time we'll do something simpler, like Whatabagel...
I recently saw Kenneth Branagh's Agatha Christie movie A Haunting in Venice. at the Yorkdale, where I hadn't been since the B.C. era (before Covid). Pretty good, but for me the definitive Hercule Poirot is Peter Ustinov. (Ain't I finicky?) For what it's worth, I guessed who the culprit was. At the food court afterward, along with dinner, I had a milkshake for the first time in donkey's years.
Last week I saw Hitchcock's The Birds (for the second time) at the Yonge & Dundas. While well-made, movies like this one and The Exorcist leave me oddly cold. It's different with Psycho and Silence of the Lambs: as crazy as those stories are, at least I could (just barely) imagine them happening in real life. I suppose The Birds reflects the fears of the Cold War era, sort of like Signs deals with the fears of a post-9/11 America...
Today I saw the cartoonish horror comedy The Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn at the same place, this time for the first time. (I haven't seen the first Evil Dead, but I did see the "threequel" Army of Darkness--I think I want to see it again.) It's surprisingly stylish and witty, and Bruce Campbell is pretty cool: you could say his motto is "It works for me." I should also see Gremlins 2 and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 someday...
