Down with Love

Everyone should go see this movie! Yeah, go see the Matrix too, but everyone must go see this because I want it to get good box office press so people will make more movies like this.

Anyway, it's a romantic comedy (don't go away yet!) starring Ewan McGregor, who's absolutely wonderful in his role, and Renee Zellweger, who's, well, Renee Zellweger. And it looks and feels exactly like the romantic comedies from the sixties. And it's one of the happiest movies I've seen in a while. Not a feel good movie, but happy in that it has so much fun playing with the sixties thing and doing some things that sixties movies probably couldn't. And I also love it because things are candy colored and funnily shaped. It's almost like the anti-Catch Me If You Can. It was just lovely because it was so fully a romantic comedy, but it did the romantic comedy tropes so very well and even avoided a lot of the pitfalls.

( Spoilers for the movie in here )

So yeah, I loved it and now I want everyone to go see it because it was lovely and the theater only had ten some people when me and the boy went. Which is just sad for a movie this fun, especially when almost all romantic comedies nowadays are neither romantic nor comedic and in general just a lot of schlock.

Book ramblings

Went to the public library again today. I love public libraries so very much. Books for free! How can one go wrong?

I found they had a copy of Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic, which was nice, because there's a quote in there that I've been searching for forever. It is:

"For there are only two worlds -- your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power, provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters."

I've been leisurely rereading Sandman after getting them back from a friend, and it feels like a long chat with some old friend I haven't met up with in quite a while. One of my very favorite issues of Sandman is "Ramadan" in Fables and Reflections for the beautiful idea of a dream city, for the gorgeous prose and the visuals all combined. I also love the very first one in Preludes and Nocturnes, Nuala, all of Brief Lives, "The Sound of Her Wings," the one where Dream first meets Hob gadling, the Chinese story in The Wake, the art of The Kindly Ones, "Tales in the Sand," the introduction of the Endless in Season of Mists, Lucifer and so many other things. Now I feel a desire to reread Good Omens, which is very possibly one of the funniest books I've ever read. Sarah even bought me a stuffed boa named Crowley after she named her stuffed owl Aziraphale.

Then I borrowed Abhorsen by Garth Nix, which concludes the interesting world he started in Sabriel, an anthology co-edited by Robin McKinley, and The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon because it's gotten excellent reviews. Straying a little from fantasy there. It's funny how I find almost all my books in the YA section. I just read Armageddon Summer by Jane Yolen and Bruce Coville because lm liked it, and it was good. The kids sounded real, and I liked how it looked at faith and religion and family.

Now I will reread The Books of Magic. Yay!