Sunday

This weekend, I saw two relatively entertaining movies, "In Bruges" and "Leatherheads." Two good movies in one weekend for me is a record. Movies usually disappoint me, and as each movie ends another sliver of my faith in the film industry floats away to join an abyss of Hollywood mediocrity.
"In Bruges" is the first movie I've seen with Colin Farell. I now realize that he's been in about 25 movies since 1999, but I didn't know who he was until Friday. He plays a hit man who is forced to take a vacation in Bruges, Belgium, with his partner and they don't know why they're there, but find out about halfway through the movie. The movie themes capture the feeling of hopelessness one has after making an irreversible mistake; the excitement of meeting someone new when everything clicks into place as if by magic; and the curiosity one feels when one crosses paths with a midget (from the movie: "They prefer to be called dwarves.").
Leatherheads is lighthearted and goofy, and played out in the style of a movie that might have been produced in the 1960s, with manic cheerfulness, lines that sound too rehearsed, and costumes that look like they could have come from any Jimmy Stewart movie. It manages to be funny in a refreshing way that makes the viewer appreciate the lives of our relatives who lived through the mid-1920s. One of the annoying mistakes that movie makers make is not incorporating patterns of speech from the relevant time period into the script, but that wasn't the case (too often) in the movie; it tended to take you back and you could believe you were watching a scene from 1925. I like that. And you don't have to like or understand football to appreciate the movie.