Turkey Day

Word of the day : pertinacious
                                                  : adhering resolutely to an opinion, purpose, or design 
                                                  : stubbornly tenacious, persistent

Happy Thanksgiving, readers! 

Our Thanksgiving week got off to a good start - we spent the day in Charleston on Monday.  
Yesterday, we had a good day too - I took Gabriel on some errands.  Julia caught up with a new BBC show she likes, Call the Midwife.  
Today, well... who knows?  But these are things I would like to do over the break: 

- start Call the Midwife, maybe even Downton Abbey
- finish this collection of noir stories I've been reading (only three to go...)
- read Katherine Boo's nonfiction book about life in a Mumbai slum, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers 
- keep plowing forward in Ken Follett's Winter of the World (I stopped for awhile)
- work a little more on my novel 
- take Daisy and Gabriel on plenty of walks 
- get caught up on some TV shows
- watch some goof football and college basketball games

There are a few movies opening today: 

Life of Pi    Ang Lee's hyped, destined-to-be Oscar contender, taken from the all-but-unfilmable Yann Martel bestseller.   A young Indian man is stranded on a boat in the Pacific with no one but a Bengal tiger as his companion.   A technical achievement, though it has plenty of religious overtones. 
Verdict: Interested 

Hitchcock     Oh, yeah.  Sacha Gervasi's fun, amusing look at the making of Psycho - a film for those interested in the iconic director's psyche (though some critics say the filmmakers go about this in a too facile, one-dimensional manner) and for film nerds interested the behind-the-scenes goings-on of a classic.  Anthony Hopkins, as Hitch ("hold the cock"), and Helen Mirren, as his wife Alma, are Oscar contenders, and Scarlett Johansson is Janet Leigh.  Toni Collette and Jessica Biel are also here.
Verdict: Very Interested 

Rust and Bone    Marion Cotillard is in the Oscar running too as a whale trainer trying to move on from a terrible accident (involving the whale - take a guess).  She starts a relationship with a poor single father who treats her without pity.  The story sounds wild, and there are some mood shifts, but critics for the most part say it's an interesting journey. 
Verdict: Mildly Interested 

Red Dawn    Dreadful reviews for this needless remake of an 80's film that stunk to high heaven.  The original saw Communists invading a small American town, inciting a ragtag band of high school students to defend the town.  Well, the remake has North Korea invading the town of Spokane, Washington... come together, kids!  The acting - the cast includes Chris Hemsworth, Josh Peck, Josh Hutcherson, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan - is supposed to be bad.  
Verdict: Not Interested  


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Football picks for tomorrow: 

Houston over Detroit    (though a scrappy, underachieving Detroit team could give a suddenly vulnerable-to-the-pass Houston squad a hell of a challenge)
Dallas over Washington
New England over the NY Jets



















I'll be back on Saturday!