It was K’s birthday today, so we took the night off.  No homework, no research.  I spent the afternoon reading Bone and napping, and we ate in Alexandria with friends, one of whom who had traveled from the coast.  Then we had to hop across the street to get in line for Quantum of Solace.

I hate movie theaters.

Seriously, if there is a hell, it’s a movie theater like the one we were in tonight.  The thing about theaters is, they’d be great if it weren’t for all of the people.  It was packed, and we had to sit way off to the side and way in front, with a bunch of loud kids in the front row, someone with a laser pointer in the back, and, I swear, the couple behind may as well have bought one ticket because they were in the same seat the whole time.  Come on, kids.  Why do you pay eight dollars to sit in the dark with strangers and make-out?

Oh.

But still.

Go see Madagascar 2 or something, and leave me and Bond in peace, or at least quit pressing against the back of my fucking chair.  I would have been a lot more upset had the movie been worth a crap, but after Casino Royale, this new movie was disappointing.  I might do a review of it soon, but for now it’s late and I didn’t like it.  It felt empty.  Bond has been reduced to a generic action hero, and yes, I understand that it’s a revenge picture, the logical product of the events of the last film, but does that mean it has to be bland?  It needed to be both shorter and longer, for different reasons.

Drove home in the dark and the snow behind cars going slower than they needed to, talking about our friend who invents people, and the things we had done.  Rock Band until one in the morning while the owners of the house slept upstairs, and now I’m home and tired.  Right.  Bed now.

Have you ever noticed that whenever a film or a television program wants to flashback to something that happened earlier in a male character’s life, they will usually depict that younger version of the hero with the exact same actor only with longer, dorky hair?  Is this trying to say that in our youth we are by nature untidy, unkempt, and it is only when we become adults that we morph into these polished, well-groomed individuals?  Were we all so dorky and awkward in our youth?  I always have wanted to see a rendering of a time laspe between these younger and current versions of the character.  At what point, at what age did the hair come off, did he start to stand up straighter, did the braces get removed?  When did our hero become as cool as he is now?  I think it’s a natural tendency to think of ourselves as cooler, more put together than our past selves were.  But, take a picture of yourself now and look at it in five, ten, twenty years and see what you think then.  In our present, in our now, perhaps we are always cooler than we used to be.

I’ve been thinking about how infrequently I see really spectacular acting in film.  Most of what I watch is very good, with good performances throughout, but there are a select few movies in which I’ve felt that the actor or actress really went through a significant change, exerted an incredible effort, and actually became someone else.  In many movies, the actors are playing what amount to essentially tweaked versions of themselves, or, in the case of someone like Nicolas Cage, they play the exact same character, at the exact same register, in every goddamn movie.  But, usually once or twice a year, we get Charlize Theron in Monster or Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood.  I love these films, because there is such a sense of otherness, of consummate care and craft.

Tonight, I saw The Sea Inside, a Spanish film in which Javier Bardem (of recent No Country for Old Men fame) plays Ramon Sampedro, a quadriplegic who has been confined to a bed for 28 years.  Bardem, who must have been in his mid-thirties when playing the role, thanks to subtle makeup effects, looks startlingly like a fifty-five year old man.  The makeup is so good that if I hadn’t already seen Bardem on screen, I would have assumed he was actually as old as the character he was playing.  The film is able to play on this in a very interesting way.  We’ve all seen the gimmick.  In flashbacks, the younger version of the character is never the same actor, but always someone with a rough approximation of the facial structures and hair color, and we have to take on faith is the younger version of our protagonist.  In The Sea Inside, the younger incarnation of Ramon is much closer to Bardem’s actual age, and it is the character in the present that is the construction.  It’s incredibly satisfying, and gives a weight to the flashback sequences as I’ve rarely seen in films, because we do not have to suspend our disbelief to draw a link between the past and the present; it’s simply the same man.

Bardem’s performance was critically acclaimed, as well it should have been.  This performance was much more impressive to me than his turn as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, although I thought that role was also incredible.

This marks the second excellent Spanish film I’ve seen in as many weeks, with the first being El Orfanato (released in the US as The Orphanage ).  I would highly recommend both for anyone who loves a moving story, stellar acting and skillful film-making.