Brain dead in Cairo

I've been forcing myself to relax lately.

My stomach is in bad shape, my hair is falling out, and I have more spots on my face than I've seen in 10 years.

What am I anxious about, you ask? Let's see ... wedding ... unemployment ... move ... future ... career ... wedding ...

So last night the kitties and I had a chick-flick double-header. Thanks to KC's sister I have a few new movies, and last night I picked Atonement and ... erm ... [sigh] ... Twilight.

There, I said it. Yes, I watched the preteen vampire movie last night. Sober. Why don't I take the second part first, so your last thought of me today isn't this one.

Twilight has been touted as a preteen phenomenon, an abstinence parable, and the first in a series of four "doorstops." A few months ago I saw a woman on the bus reading the book, and when I asked if it was any good, she blushed and gave me a slightly ashamed "no." I have not read the book.

The movie wasn't so bad that I switched it off, but it definitely reminded me of SciFridays - the Sci-Fi Channel, that is, not NPR. Actually, come to think of it, the heroine didn't have her clothes mysteriously shredded in the course of the show, so I guess it wasn't a dead ringer.

I was mildly intrigued by the premise: Boy meets girl. Boy is vampire. Girl doesn't care ... and so on. I wonder why the female is never the undead in these scenarios? I mean, wouldn't that be sexy too? Or maybe only girls are turned on by this premise, so a gender bender wouldn't make much sense. Do males find the impossibility of consummation erotic? I'm guessing not.

What's even more intriguing to me is how the preteen set has latched on to this idea of abstinence as erotic. Remember the X-Files, and how much worse the show got when Mulder and Scully finally started, you know, touching? I guess that was the same sort of tension, but that was what, 10 years ago? When people actually wore clothes on TV and we watched because things weren't real.

I watched Atonement first last night, the film adaptation of Ian McEwan's acclaimed novel. I read the book last summer and I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as Saturday, which I thought was one of the best books I'd ever read. There was something deliberately obtuse about the prose that turned me off from the beginning - although maybe I was just well-set-up for the ending.

I wasn't crazy about the movie either. I enjoyed the first bit, diction, sets and scenery a la Gosford Park. [While I'm confessing things here, I might as well admit that I had to turn the subtitles on the first time I watched GP.] Yes, I like period-piece chick movies with a bit of romance and a bit of tragedy.

But I became far less invested once the movie transitioned into the war period. I just couldn't grab onto anything emotionally rich in the later parts of the movie - all I could see was how incredibly thin Keira Knightley looked. And the very end of the movie lacked the impact I felt at the end of the novel; it just seemed tacked on.

Ah, well. At least I wasn't working!