happy New Year

We ended up watching Silver Linings Playbook instead of Apocalypse Now Redux.  The latter is a truly brilliant film, and the only war film I like, but it is heavy going.  Besides the subject matter, it has a running time of 202 minutes, and didn't seem quite the things for someone still suffering from cracked ribs and a cold.  Silver Linings Playbook comes in a whole eighty minutes shorter, and is a rom com, practically light viewing, apart from the fact that it also deals with mental illness.

It won Jennifer Lawrence an Oscar for Best Actress, after she was nominated for an earlier film Winter's Bone.  I am a huge Jennifer Lawrence fan, and look forward to American Hustle coming out on DVD.  In the meantime, Silver Linings Playbook is pretty good.  In fact, the early scenes in which the bipolar character is at his most manic and deluded are almost painful to watch, if you have known people suffering from any kind of up and down mental disorder.

So that was our New Year's Eve.  We managed to stop the cats eating the cheese, or walking on it, though they made it impossible to nibble at tiny slivers throughout the film, unless we were prepared to put them out of the room for the duration.  Instead we had to eat as much cheese as we thought we wanted, fairly rapidly, then pause the film while we put the rest safely away in the fridge.  It seemed antisocial to lock the beasties out, when we had the stove lit.

Today was extremely windy, and it poured with rain.  I'd have liked it to be nice, so that I could have done some symbolic New Year's Day gardening, but it wasn't.  There again, I am still trying to work out whether I am going down with a version of the cold.  I do hope not, since I am supposed to be going to London tomorrow and was hoping to go and visit my father's cousin on Friday, now we've discovered where he is following his operation.  It would not be a good and compassionate act to go and breath germs all over an eighty-five year old who is convalescing from hip replacement surgery.