Tom & Alissa

Pygmalion was quite good, and I can heartily recommend it for anyone in New York . . . if you can get tickets. Claire Danes is going to lose her voice from it, but she and the rest of the cast are delightful, and Jefferson Mays is as far from Rex Harrison’s Henry Higgins as you can really get (and more believable because of it).

Saw Eastern Promises on Saturday. It’s graphically brutal and bloody in a few choice spots (I closed my eyes). However, not only is David Cronenberg a confirmed genius (storytelling, the look of it, everything is just so interesting), but Viggo Mortensen has finally reached the upper echelon of my personal list of great living actors, playing a member of the Russian mafia in London with completely convincingly and without any hints of Aragorn. Not for the faint of heart, though.

We met with friends who are in from Scotland for their first trip to the US. (NYC is a very weird place to go on a first trip to the US, too.) We brought them out to Brooklyn, and after they got lost and then found again, we had dinner at Miracle Grill (southwestern American), then dessert at the Cocoa Bar. They were intrigued by the discovery of blue corn, which, we informed them, does indeed grow in the US and does not involve food coloring. Who knew?

On Sunday, the Village Church had our annual outdoor service in Washington Square Park:

It was actually the first one I’d gone to, and it was a lot of fun. Perfect weather, plenty of people dropping by to listen in, and some really good discussion during the question & answer time. It’s so good to hear people asking civil questions and giving civil answers in a public forum, you know?

Afterwards Tom and I went to see Across the Universe, which was a giant disappointment and probably not worth your ticket money unless you’re really, really into Julie Taymor or the Beatles. The acting was ok, and the music was totally re-imagined and therefore fun to listen to, but the story and script were so bad that it was dead in the water. I think she was trying to make an extended music video, but . . . it wasn’t. It’s quite lovely to look at, but wait and rent it. (And most of the people walking out of the theater were saying that as well.)

Tomorrow night we’re seeing Flight of the Red Balloon in press screenings at the New York Film Festival. We’ve only just seen another of Hsiao-hsien Hou’s earlier films (the lovely and meditative Cafe Lumiere) and saw Three Times last year when it was in theaters; this one is actually in French and stars Juliette Binoche.

On a non-movie note, we had some standing credit at the local Community Bookstore (they have the best fiction section EVER), and Tom went by the other day and brought home Annie Dillard’s new book The Maytrees and an older Lorrie Moore book, Anagrams. Can’t wait to tackle them.

Lastly, we were introduced to this last night while having dinner with our friends Victoria and Sam. Enjoy.