Hello. Julia and I watched Crazy Stupid Love last night and we both enjoyed it. Of all the cast members, it was really Ryan Gosling who stood out. Perhaps that's unsurprising considering how consistently terrific he is, but I'm not sure I had ever seen him in a romantic comedy before, and I was really floored by his great timing. Check out his effortlessly perplexed, amused expressions when Steve Carell tells him that he's only ever been with one woman. I've seen nine Gosling performances to date and am impressed by the way he continues to grow. The guy simply doesn't throw performances away, and he has the gift of making thinking look magnetic.
Speaking of actors, having just seen Beginners, I think it's reasonable to argue that Ewan McGregor just might be one of the most underrated actors out there. It's a moving, if occasionally cutesy, film with predictably marvelous turns by Christopher Plummer (as a widower who comes out of the closet) and the impossibly charming Melanie Laurent, but it's McGregor, poised and calmly assured, who grounds the film's whimsy. If you were to ask anyone you knew who the the best or who their favorite five or ten actors were, I doubt McGregor would make anyone's list. Nor would he make a list of the sexiest. He's someone you don't even think about. If you see a preview of a movie he's in, chances are you wouldn't want to see it any more or less because of his presence. But he's too remarkable, too rangy, to pass so anonymously. In the last decade alone, he's been nothing but superb: quietly, inexorably befuddled in Roman Polanski's masterful The Ghost Writer; charming in the otherwise unremarkable Big Fish; adorable in Down With Love; brooding and rawly charismatic in the Scottish noir Young Adam; he's even been worth watching in otherwise forgettable films like Cassandra's Dream, Miss Potter, and Moulin Rouge!
I'm reading a really interesting book right now - no, not the Tom Perrotta book I bragged about yesterday, which I in fact haven't even started yet - but Mark Obmascik's The Big Year, about a particular "Big Year," in which three men set out on a cross-country race in 1998 to see as many species of birds as they possibly could. Obmascik has great affection for these people and he dug up great information on the history of birding and Big Years in this country - from Audobon to Peterson's field guides, to the various types who have spent thousands of dollars crisscrossing the continent, some of them alerted by tips and sightings by various rare-bird ornithological groups and societies. Fascinating stuff. And I'll be damned if reading about these people, who claim their obsession is a genuine sport, doesn't make doing a Big Year at some point leapfrog to the top of my bucket list.
As a show of appreciation to the book, I have decided to post a little information about one species of bird a day that Obmascik mentions in the book. (And I'll never refer to Wikipedia either!)
Today's bird is a black-legged kittiwake. A kittiwake, which can be red-legged also, is medium-sized to small, with pale grey back and upper wings. It's a type of gull that breeds in the north Pacific, the Arctic, and the north Atlantic. It nests in colonies on cliffs on offshore islands, impossible-to-reach spots along the coastal mainland. It's rare amongst gulls in that it dives underwater for its food; a kittiwake spends its entire winter at sea. They are remarkably tolerant and relaxed when approached by humans. The best place to see them in this country is off the coast of Washington on boat trips.
Oh, yeah...
Word of the day: turpitude : inherent baseness, depravity
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