Bleh.  I started this post a week and a half ago.  Then my best intentions were railroaded when the final season of The Tudors arrived on my doorstep.  I had also had grand plans that day to listen to the new Grinderman album, watch Cemetery Junction, and work on my novel, but there was some Henry Cavill to be ogled, and damned if I wasn’t the woman for the job.  Please forgive my moral turpitude.

Now, a mad dash through the last week and a half:

1) The Town – Living in Boston as I do, I am not at liberty to bypass films such as this one.  That would be turning my back on my community, after all.  Never mind the fact that my dozen or so friends who went Bennifer spotting in Cambridge on their lunch hours while this movie was being shot had almost convinced me that I had a vested interest in its box office success.  (I don’t.)

I liked it, apart from the gentleman seated behind me, who made little snerking sounds every time a recognizable landmark appeared on the screen, as though he could just barely contain his giddiness over this unexpected intersection of Art and Real Life.  I did not care for the end of the movie (isn’t that always the way?), but I found the rest to be sufficiently good to make up for it.  I felt that poor Pete Postlethwait was underused, by and large.  I love him.  He has that Ben Kingsley-like ability to shift endearingly from vulnerable grandpappy to sadistic sociopath.  And his name is fun to say — give it a go.

2) Everybody into the Pool, by Beth Lisick – I picked this book up for . . . no reason whatsoever, really.  Apparently Ms. Lisick has written for This American Life, which — I confess here and now — I have never heard.  Please understand, I’ve already bitten off enough in other media forms to give me night sweats of stress; if I were to add radio to the mix, I might become a danger to myself and others.

The book is a series of personal essays, à la Sedaris (David, that is — speaking of This American Life), all of which fall back on Lisick’s propensity to embrace and, indeed, burrow into irony in her casual lifestyle.  Some of the stories felt a little wayward to me — at times, even a little tarted up, a little forced.  But never in a high-stakes way, if you catch my meaning; I learned simply to cock my head a bit and wait for the ship to right itself.  I think the problem is that the stories centered on walking the tightrope between suburban yuppiedom and hippie-tastic artistic hedonism, and I’ve simply known too many people who’ve planted their proverbial flags on that high-wire.  I was missing the element of surprise.

Still, no stranger to the joys of irony, I certainly found a thing or two here to which I could relate.  Particularly the final selection, in which Lisick discusses her disorientation after having a child:

 “Yes, Cheryl,” I said.  “I would love to bring my baby over to your house, so you can show me how to massage it.”

“Um, it’s a him, right?” she asked, obviously a little taken aback that I would refer to my child as an inanimate object — a habit I was finding hard to break.

“Yes!  Him!”  I corrected.  “So I can learn how to massage him.”

No, I don’t have a child, nor am I likely to; my smug enjoyment of the passage above helps to illustrate why.

3) The Lost Skeleton Returns Again – This, I hardly need tell you, was the much-anticipated sequel to The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra — a.k.a., the source of the immortal line:

Do you know what this meteor could mean to science?  If we find it, and it’s real, it could mean a lot.  It could mean actual advances in the field of science.

And how!  As for the second installment of the poor beleaguered skeleton’s plight (hint: bits of him are missing now), it was pleasant to revisit the old crowd.  I felt that the arrival of the Canteloupe People in the mix was a bit overweighted, but I suppose the producers had to remain faithful to the story’s true-life events.  Click here for the film’s portentous highlight.

4)  Never Let Me Go – A peppy little jaunt through the pratfalls of human relationships.  Just kidding.  Bleak as the day is long.

I’ve not actually read any Kazuo Ishiguro (yet), but I’ve seen some of “his” movies, and goodness, he never lets anyone just be together, does he?  Success took the form of Keira Knightley not annoying me (she almost always annoys me), as well as the casting of Isobel Meikle-Small as Young Carey Mulligan.  As far as I can tell, Isobel Meikle-Small IS Young Carey Mulligan, which means that people-cloning and organ-harvesting are real, which means that the story is true and the bleakness is deep within all of us and humanity has lost its soul, aaiiiee!

Also, the music was pretty.