Movie night

I picked up the kids yesterday at my mom's. Ali brought them from their dad's house, so I got to visit with her and the baby, too. Fun! Alexa is three months old now and is full of smiles and sweetness and crankiness after I hold her for about a minute and a half. She fights sleep. (I'm sure she just doesn't want to miss anything.) But I got to hold her after she went to sleep and it was just the best afternoon ever. Ali seems to be able to take my mom with a grain of salt, so that's a plus. (She probably takes me with a grain of salt, too. How funny! It's so easy to see the crazy in my mom without seeing it in myself.)

Last night, the kids all had friends over and Dalt had a fire department meeting, so I watched the movie "Arthur" again for the first time in a hundred years. I really enjoyed it! Dudley Moore was so perfect for that part, absolutely hilarious. But I'm sure that movie would never have been made in this day and time. The man drove drunk - a lot. And Liza Minnelli smoked in almost every scene. It actually made me want a cigarette. Come to think of it, I did smoke when that movie came out. Wow.

The night before, I watched a Japanese movie by a director I like, Ryuichi Hiroki. He's an artist as well as a filmmaker and I love the way he shoots a movie. The one I saw was about a lonely woman, obviously with some issues (she's a bulimic with a tendency to drink too much), who runs off for several days with a lonely truck driver she sees at a convenience store one dark, snowy night. The movie is quiet, which I like, and leaves a lot to the imagination, which I also like. The cause of our heroine's problems is only alluded to in a few flashbacks and the ending is not all wrapped up in a pretty bow. It was really like being a fly on a wall, watching two people experience each other while they travel together through a snow-covered, freeway-bound, Japanese landscape.

I liked it a lot.