So I did go with Becket last night, and it was a terrific movie, not least of all because of Peter O’Toole’s performance as King Henry II. It earned him (along with co-star Richard Burton) a Best Actor nomination at that year’s Oscars. (With The Lion in Winter just four years later, O’Toole remains the only actor nominated twice for playing the same character in two different films.) The movie’s not completely historically accurate, but it’s a great film with two towering performances.
I can’t even jokingly say the same thing about Equilibrium, which I watched this evening and which is just laughably ridiculous. It’s also ridiculously entertaining, thanks largely to gun kata (an actual pseeudo-martial-art invented for the movie) and this image of a confused and horror-stricken Christian Bale holding a puppy. (Spoiler warnings at both links, I suppose.)
I definitely can’t say the same thing about Upside Down, which I watched after that. (Well, I took a short break to watch that episode of Star Trek where Kirk “fights” the Gorn.) The movie is ridiculous, but rarely in a good way, and it makes zero actual sense. I enjoyed live-tweeting both it and Equilibrium — it’s telling that Becket was good enough to keep me mostly off of Twitter while I was watching — but I’d only count the former in the “so bad it’s good” category.
I spent the rest of the day not doing a whole lot. I answered a couple of work e-mails over my phone, really just so a book wouldn’t get delayed going to the printer. I swear, beyond proofing a PDF of the book’s cover, there wasn’t a whole lot of actual work involved.
I finished reading Mockingjay, the last book in the Hunger Games trilogy, which I didn’t really love, or even necessarily like. With the second book in the series, which I also found disappointing but much less so, Suzanne Collins could have been accused of just doing more of the same. So maybe that’s why the third book feels like more of a departure…but lack of plot wouldn’t have been my first choice for trying something different.
I also did a little writing of my own. I didn’t progress too far in this short story I’m working on, but I poked around at it for an hour or so and expect to do more in the next couple of weeks.
And that was Monday, my first official day off in this two-weeks-plus vacation I’ve somehow lucked into.