What did you do today?
A parent asks and a child gives the simplest of answers to the most mundane of questions: What did you do today? But what if you couldn’t answer, because you can’t remember. This weekend’s video rental dealt with that dark area known as neurological damage. What if you couldn’t remember? What if the act of sequencing was derailed?
We rented three movies last evening but couldn’t watch them because the video setup at home had lost all sound. The aftershocks from a summer of parties, I suppose. I didn’t want to rewire the stack of cheap video gear we call our home entertainment system, so I sent the others off to a “real” cinema and waited for daylight. This afternoon, with the clock running down on our rental period, I watched the first in my laptop.
The Lookout stars (among others) Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jeff Daniels. I’d not seen anything from the former Tommy Solomon of 3rd Rock From The Sun, so there were no preconceptions to alter my cinematic reality. He does a great job. The movie may be one of the better ones I’ve seen this year. One that I’d watch again. Jeff Daniels steps well outside his usual persona and takes on the role of a wise blind roomie. Throw in some suspense, some angst, some local colour from the American heartland and you have a good couple of hours of entertainment.
In passing, I then felt inspired enough to resort the wires in our vidpile, so we’ll watch our other rentals on a larger screen. We’re not ready to go home theatre just yet. Besides, who needs video when you have radio? This afternoon, Crosscountry Checkup on CBC allowed freeform reminiscing about the summer of 1967, when our family avoided Expo by moving to Ontario from Nova Scotia. Our own version of an expanding world. After all, when you’ve seen the lights of Quebec City, the world is suddenly a much bigger place. That’s my story, even if I didn’t share it with the rest of the nation (I’ll wait until Rex is back on duty, thank you very much).
