Setsuled's Journal

Happy Thanksgiving, people. At dinner last night (I had two Thanksgiving dinners!), everyone said what they were thankful for. The only thing I could think of was, "The internet."

So now I'm strangely sleepy. I may stop making sense, because I'm so sleepy, or because I've been reading Robyn's Evil Podiatrist.

This evening was spent with my sister decorating my mom's white Christmas tree with Fruit Loop colour lights. My mother wanted a tree different from every previous year. Personally, I still prefer green trees with red and gold decorations. Call me old fashioned. In fact I am.

Oh, yes, I like Christmas. In fact, this year promises to have a more Christmassy Christmas for me than usual. Because somehow, Christmas for me has always felt connected to vacuous, unknown territories, perhaps with tall robed figures chanting in the shadows.

I saw Walk the Line to-day. Joaquin Phoenix did a good job, especially considering he really didn't resemble Johnny Cash, particularly not in the late 1960s. But he did a good job emulating Cash's voice.

The story goes through the usual rock star biography waypoints, without ever truly painting complex people on its canvas--some childhood trauma, surprise success, divorce, drugs, love affair, getting clean . . . etcetera. The movie went to some pains to explain and make excuses for characters' motives. Sometimes I tried figuring out how the true events differed from the fiction, as when Cash's young children walk in on him screaming at his first wife wall pinning her on the floor. This was preceded--out of the children’s' view--by a standard sort of yelling argument. I had to wonder if maybe the movie version is a child's glossed-over memory of seeing her father rape her mother.

Robert Patrick was good as Johnny's father. Although the filmmaker's reticence to use age prosthetic makeup was a little disconcerting as everyone looked the same age from 1945 to 1970, except when Johnny was played by a child actor. This means that Johnny looked older than his mother in the scene where he was leaving home to enlist in the Air Force.

Time for more coffee . . .