Stay-cation

Word of the day: agelast : someone who never laughs

A stay-cation! Six days off! I'm looking forward to hanging out with Julia and Gabriel, watching movies, starting Rosetta Stone, going on a date, maybe dropping by the park, finishing the book I'm reading now, watching some basketball...

Last night, we watched The Next Three Days, a dynamite, crackerjack thriller with Russell Crowe as a Pittsburgh professor planning to break his wife (Elizabeth Banks) out of prison, where she is serving a life sentence for killing her boss. Written and directed with sturdy, mounting tension by Paul Haggis, the film gets off to a terrific start, slows down during its middle leg, laying the groundwork for a brilliantly staged chase scene, one of the best in recent memory. One of Haggis's feats is that he isn't afraid to have his characters remain so unlikable and unsympathetic for so long; Crowe's relentless, one-track insistence of Banks' innocence really tests the audience's goodwill. Sharply edited, well-acted, full of fine location shooting, it's a real winner.

I can't say as much for Stone, a dreary, one-note drama with a lot of build-up and little to no payoff. Robert DeNiro is the caseworker who takes on titular prisoner Edward Norton, never aware that the latter is trying to manipulate the older, listless, about-to-retire man into a relationship with his wife (Milla Jovovich). The movie is intriguing for a while, but there's simply no culmination to any of the drama, no resolution (let alone a satisfying one) to the escalating tension. There are lot of religious overtones and,, frankly, a little of that goes a long way.

Paranormal Activity 2 freaked me out big-time. I felt it was a more vigorous workout than the first one, creepier, eerier, with bigger scares, slightly diminished only by its abrupt ending.

Another piece of trivia: Can you name the 4-time Oscar-nominated star who has been in the following films: the voice in Eagle Eye, Next (with Nic Cage), The Shipping News, Evolution, the-SNL-skit-made-into-a-movie The Ladies Man, the remake of Psycho, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Assassins (with Sly Stallone and Antonio Banderas), Benny & Joon, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Madonna's Body of Evidence?

Because I'm approaching the last hundred or so pages of Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden, a first-rate novel, in which the great portrait painter John Singer Sargent is a minor character, I decided to include one of Sargent's most famous paintings, Madame X, a work that unleashed a furious scandal when it was shown at the Salon in 1884 because of its suggestiveness of sexuality and the pale, pasty skin tone of the woman, modeled on the socialite Madame Gautreau. Sargent eventually left Paris.