bad movie, great book, clean room, lazy bitch.

1. bad movie: jenny (lunstead) and i saw sweet home alabama on thursday night. and honestly, "bad" doesn't entirely cover it. it has been a very long time since i have been conscious of my own boredom in a theatre movie. (i love, love, LOVE movies in theatres.) granted, there was practically no one there and therefore no audience chemistry, but i'm not convinced there would have been laughs stemming from anything other than vicarious embarrassment or mean-spirited ridicule anyway. poor, poor reese witherspoon, whom i used to think was so cool.

what was wrong with it, you ask? it was contrived, and boring (as i mentioned already), and involved all the most hackneyed and one-sided southern stereotypes: confederate-flag throw pillows, plantation homes of grace and splendor, civil war reenactors, teen matrons with babies on their hips, egregiously bad faux rockabilly, and large men with mullets and pickup trucks. witherspoon's accent was spotty at best. best of all (you know, where by "best" i mean "most awful") was the cute but useless addition of an asexual "gay" friend, whose drunken outing by the main character resulted in a single outpouring of don't-ask-don't-tell "goodwill," a hearty round of backslapping among his circle of (straight, male, southern) friends, and no other mention Ever Again. also, in a movie purporting to be about alabama, the only black characters were (1) a new york fashion designer and (2), (3) two post office service employees with one line each.

but at least we got to laugh at it. in fact, we laughed ourselves silly.

2. great book: the corrections by jonathan franzen was, oh my Lord, sooooo impressive. i finished all 550-odd pages of it in just a couple of days (see lazy bitch, below). i suppose it won't be a "classic," whatever that means, but it is incredibly rich in both theme and detail. the "corrections" of the title refer to prisons, editing, the stock market, family relationships (including the discipline of children and the healing of old wounds), medicating both illness and normal feeling...the list goes on. plus, the story is downright amazing. most interesting to me is the way the book is about so many places that are familiar to me. one character teaches/taught at a college that is swarthmore in everything but name; much of the book is set in a midwestern town that could easily be...well, any of the midsize midwestern towns i've lived in; another large chunk of the story takes place in philly.

i'm slightly worried about the fact that none of the characters really turned out to be all that sympathetic. i wanted someone to turn out, well, "correct" or at least "corrected" in the end. it didn't happen. do literary characters have to be fucked up and unlikable to be interesting? do horrible things have to happen to them? is it possible, just now, to write literature that has a "good guy"?

3. clean room: mine! finally unearthed and reorganized all my kitchen stuff so that i can actually use it when i want to. also put my fan away for the winter and moved a long row of books to its place. made my bed and folded/hung the drifts of clothing that had been encroaching, slowly but steadily, on the entire front half of my room, having already taken the back. i could just sit here for ever, now. unfortunately, i probably won't get to, because...

4. lazy bitch: me! yeah, did i mention that the reason i could go to movies and read books and organize my room was that i wasn't writing a seminar paper? or, indeed, the mathstat problem set due this week? or any of the other stuff i was supposed to do over break and didn't? oh well...i guess that's what break is for? maybe? (whatever.)