A gray Monday morning here in Seattle, but I don’t mind. I’m too busy trying to shake off the domesticity of the weekend and gird my loins for the week.
On Friday we went to see Intolerable Cruelty, which got the most out-loud laughs of any movie I’ve seen in years in the sold out theatre. The kids on IMDB think it’s the weakest of the Coen Brothers’ movies, and that might be true—the characters aren’t nearly as quirky, the ending too forced. But on the other hand it’s also the Coens’ first movie in ages where the jokes were firmly grounded in something other than dialect humor. (Not that I minded in the earlier films—“them sirens loved him up and turned him into a horny toad!” being a line for which I will wait years, if necessary, for the time when I can drop it into conversation without forcing the setup—but Simon and Garfunkel on the bagpipes was funnier without being cruel.) Lisa liked it too, which is a stricter criterion of greatness—her sense of humor is a lot less forgiving than mine.