Friday, July 20th
Life has resumed its usual patterns with me being back at work and Tommy being back in school. There's not a lot of anything unusual going on. We took last week as a bit of a catch up on Birmingham cultural life. Saw a production of 'Damn Yankees' (in which the local talent ran rings around the expensive Equity import) that was amusing, but not as on fire as it should be, a decent cabaret featuring friends Bill, Emily and Lucas and 'Fuddy Meers', one of David Lindsay-Abaire's absurdist comedies which is also amusing and well performed but doesn't quite have the over the top quality that would take it to dangerous places. We were supposed to go to a new play, 'Blackpool and Parrish' but I threw my back out on Sunday morning and had to spend about 24 hours doped up in bed to be functional for work on Monday so I took drugs and rewatched the long cut of 'The Lord of the Rings'.Birmingham has joined the IMAX family so Tommy and I paid the premium to see the latest Harry Potter on the really big screen and it was good fun. The movie works, the visual look is fabulous, the performances are great, but it feels very perfunctorily written and edited. It's one of the shorter Potters and misses some of the richness of character and moment that some of the other films have had. It could have been ten minutes longer without dragging and given more of the plot room to breathe. Various characters are dispensed with after about a minute and a half and we never really do figure out what the Order of the Phoenix actually is. Another Potter weekend this weekend as the last book arrives via UPS. I imagine every truck in the country will be out and about delivering it on Saturday. Something like 3.5 million advance orders between Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
We're descending into contractor land over the remodel. The final contract is being spelled out and we should be able to start in a couple of weeks. It's going to cost the earth but needs to be done.
posted by Andy @ 10:17 AM
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