Me: 1 Acrophobia: 0

Because I have been traveling for 18 hours straight, my full trip report will not be done tonight.

Suffice it to say that Costa Rica is nothing short of awesome. The people, the scenery, the animals, the food - everything but the roads.

Despite my desire to go everywhere, I will definitely have to make it back to CR; I only saw a tip of what the country has to offer and I need to see it all.

More after I've showered and slept.

If Only George of the Jungle Were Real

Despite some previous posting, in the end, I am indeed heading off to Costa Rica tonight. The trip has been shortened a tad, but I'm still getting to see Monteverde, which was a high point for me.

I'm in no way prepared for this trip. I have no clue of what I'm doing, where I'm going, where I'm staying...in essence this is a totally non-me trip. I love to overthink and have contingency plans right and left.

However, similar to my trip to France in September, I'm going into this blindly and I'm beginning to think it's a good thing. Far be it from me to say that having control over everything is something bad, but perhaps I should be a little bit more easy-going with vacations and just see what happens.

Of course if that easy going attitude leads to my being bitten by an ebola monkey, I totally take it all back.

Calling All Escorts!

Ok, I'm not really going to hire an escort, but for the moment it seems like an easy solution to a permanent problem.

In a few weeks I'm going to NY for a friend's wedding. As I have been told several times, I'll be the only single female at the wedding and quite possibly the only single person in my age bracket. And just my luck, all my married and dating friends are going to be there with the assorted spouses and significant others. To add insult to injury, I have to attend a dinner that Friday night which will be me and four couples.

Can I please slit my wrists now?

Granted in the grand scheme of things, to other people this might not seem like such a big problem. You suck it up, go, and feel like the charity case of the group. Thing is...after years of the sucking it up and years of feeling like a charity case, enough is enough. At some point, you want to be one of couples, one of the people there who feels that even if no one talks to them, they have a built in companion. I never feel more alone then when I'm with a group of couples.

So either I find a boyfriend by February 3rd or I find a Will to my Grace (i.e. a gay man to be my escort to such embarrassing functions).

And since I see neither option taking form before the due date...look for me that night, I'll be the one drinking arsenic in the corner with a bleach chaser.

The Squid and the Whale

Finally doing what hundreds of critics have been telling me to do, today I saw Noah Baumbach's hilariously sad "The Squid and the Whale" and I cannot figure out why it took me so long.
(OK, I know why it took me so long; only recently did it start showing in a theater close to my house...there are only a very few moves that will get me on a bus and they'd better be longer than an hour and a half)

"The Squid and the Whale" is the story of a family going thru a divorce in the mid 1980's. Both parents, played by Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels, have PhD's in English and while Bernard's literary career is dying out, Joan's is just taking flight. They have 2 sons, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) who is in high school and his younger brother Frank (Owen Kline). Whereas Frank is hurt by the divorce, but willing to go with the flow for the most part, Walt immediately sides with his father whom he idolizes completely. Rather than read a book or watch a movie and formulate his own opinion, Walt adopts his father's bombastic and pretentious opinions as his own. When he tells a girl he's interested in that the F. Scott Fitzgerald book she loved so much was only one of Fitzgerald's minor works and that Gatsby is his crowning achievement, the humor lies in the fact that we know he's never read either.

This quiet little movie contained more truth about life and our feelings of guilt, pain, loss, love, and happiness than almost any other film this year. Based on the writer/director's own childhood experiences, he captured the honesty that can be revealed in times of crisis. When Bernard tells Walt about Joan's extra-marital activities, and Walt then goes to Joan and throws them back in her face, the barrage of emotions Laura Linney displays perfectly echoes the reaction of someone who is simultaneously hurt and utterly pissed off.

And while the bulk of the film revolves around the reactions to the divorce, the film is also dedicated to that moment in life when you realize that your parents aren't perfect. Each of us at some point in our lives is faced with that completely devastating moment when we realize that our mother and father might not belong on the pedestal that we had previously installed them upon. For Walt this realization comes almost too late and Bernard almost catches it, but he is so self-involved it passes him by.

William Baldwin and Anna Paquin are both wonderful in their small roles as the boys' tennis coach and Bernard's student/lover, respectively. William Baldwin's Ivan is calm, easy going, and blessedly simple, all the things that Bernard is not. Anna Paquin's Lily is a young writer who falls in love with the writer and not the man. Though the characters are there to help exemplify the ever-growing valley between the parents, Paquin and Baldwin do such a wonderful job, you want to know how each of them got to this point in time.

Though many people are calling attention to the performances of the sons, to me this film solidified Linney and Daniels more than anything else. Linney has been nominated twice for an Academy Award (for "You Can Count on Me" and "Kinsey") and every performance just brings her closer and closer to the hearts and minds of the discriminating movie-going public. Jeff Daniels, on the other hand, is still trying to be taken seriously as an actor. With roles "Dumb and Dumber" and "My Favorite Martian" it can be easy to forget that Daniels is an accomplished actor who won Mia Farrow's heart in "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and assumed the needed gravitas in "Gettysburg". This year Daniels had a small but well acted role in George Clooney's "Good Night and Good Luck", but it is with "The Squid and the Whale" where he truly shines.

In a year when films seem to require a gimmick or special effects to be noticed, it is good to see that this movie is slowly, but hopefully surely, gaining a well-deserved audience.

Who Knew Brosnan was so good?

With not much of a desire to see any particular movie, I ended up seeing "The Matador" tonight and honestly, I'm damn glad I did. "The Matador" is a darkly humorous buddy comedy about a chance meeting between an assassin entering a midlife crisis (Pierce Brosnan) and a salesman at the end of his rope and the end of his luck (Greg Kinnear). And while some of the ground the movie covers might seem familiar, in the end this tidy little flick might very well surprise you.

Brosnan's Julian Noble is a man who likes his booze, his women and his men who look like women. He also likes his job, which just happens to be facilitating the removal of particular people, as he once puts it. While on a job in Mexico City, he befriends a fellow barmate, Kinnear's Danny Wright. Wright is in Mexico to close a big deal that he hopes will break him out of his three year run of bad luck which began with a family tragedy and continued through to a household disaster the morning of his flight down to Mexico. Danny is at the bar that night celebrating what he thinks was a highly successful meeting earlier that day. What ensues is a disjointed conversation between the two that is highly humorous and fairly revealing. As they talk Danny reveals what haunts him and Julian reveals his own emotional delinquency.

The rest of the movie continues on from there including a terribly funny sequence at a bullfight where Julian is showing Danny exactly what he does for money. But the big turn is later on in the film several months later Julian shows up at Danny's house in the middle of the night, seemingly out of nowhere, desperate and needy. This is where Hope Davis as Danny's wife Bean steals every scene she's in. Her excitement at housing an assassin is unexpected, but truly fitting for the movie's tone. The chemistry between Davis, Kinnear, and Brosnan is at the same time easy and electric and I wish there had been a chance to see more of it. But since in essence this movie is more about the relationship between the two men and their chemistry was just perfect, you don't notice this desire till later.

As the movie rounds the bend, the main characters basically switch places; Julian falls apart and Danny is the strong and stable one. (Though to be fair, Julian was never stable) And as the tables turn, the friendship strengthens to the point where they are both on equal footing. This brings up both stated and implied questions of morality where one wonders how much assassin is in each of us when pushed to the limit. "The Matador" has its own notions of the answers to some of these questions and leaves the rest up to the audience.

After playing James Bond for the past few years, Pierce Brosnan seemed to settle into a comfortable smarminess. He is wonderfully freed from this stereotyping in this role. Whether strolling through a hotel lobby full of well-dressed businessmen while dressed only in a speedo, sunglasses and boots, breaking down in an abandoned stairwell, or seducing a young women with barely a wink, Brosnan embodies Julian Noble's highs, lows, and everything in between...you even forget that he once had to pretend Denise Richards was a physicist. It is perhaps a blessing in disguise that Daniel Craig is taking up the license to kill as now Brosnan will be free to explore the darker and more bizarre side of himself and caricature the rut he almost fell into.

Not My Day

Well...I just emailed my friend and told her that I can't go to her wedding in Costa Rica.
An unfortunate and very large medical expense just came up which all but wiped out my savings.
And since I don't have a job yet in Boston, I can't afford to take a trip.

And then my MP3 player broke.

I believe the term for what I'm going thru is hemorrhaging money.

And yes, I am not afraid to admit that I shed a few tears as I looked at my bank statement and made the necessary calculations in my head.
Sometimes the fates conspire against you. And there's always that lovely little cliche, "man proposes, god disposes"

Sounds like the theme of my life lately.

Ode to an Annoying Coworker

For almost two and a half years I have worked beside you in our office

And Monday thru Friday for those two and a half years I have had to look into your jowly face, your piggy eyes, your scraggly chin hairs, and your greasy ponytail.

And pretend to be happy to see you.

You never learned how to work our in office system

You never learned how to speak to a customer without offending

You didn't know what "“insubordination"” meant -– even after you were warned for that very thing

You spent every day at your computer narrating your every action, like a dimwitted

DVD commentary

You wore clothes full of holes and the same shorts everyday during the summer months

Don't you own more than one pair?

Can't you buy another?

You sang any and every word that seemed interesting to you, much to the dismay of all around you

You still don'’t know how to read our order program

And continue to give customers misinformation

You think you can never be wrong – and you are mostly wrong

You laugh at your own jokes and pat yourself on the back for such brilliance

We just want to muzzle you.

For almost two and a half years I have thought and dreamed and planned revenge

Revenge for the raging headaches, the unnecessary phone calls and apologies for your mistakes

Revenge for having to listen to you rant and rave about all the "evil people" all over the world

Revenge for not being able to laugh in your face when you told us you had been abducted by aliens

For two and a half years I have waited to say this to you:

JUST SHUT THE HELL UP!

Jonny Be Good! (Please)

According to the LA Times, it would appear that my secret boyfriend, Jon Stewart, will be hosting this year's Oscars and despite my undying love and devotion to Mr. Stewart...I'm hesitant.

I'm not hesitant because I don't think he's funny or smart or capable. I think he's all of the above. But the Oscars is not his milieu. It's almost no one's milieu except for Bob Hope and Billy Crystal. In recent memory they are the only 2 hosts not to have bombed with full medals. I will say that I enjoyed Steve Martin, but Steve is just to classy for the Oscar crowd.

Hosting the Oscars is a thankless job. If the monologue doesn't include a song, today's audiences won't like it. Then the rest of the show is trying to pick up the slack from the actors who are forced to recite those painfully awful jokes while they present the Award for best editing in a feature film. While Jon can quip with the best of them, he's not particularly good at kissing ass. If you don't believe me watch his interview with John Kerry - ouch. Jon is at his best when he's leading some political pundit down the long and winding road towards self-incrimination. And when it works, it is a thing of utmost beauty. But this is not the venue for such beauty.

The expectations for Jon are so great that he just has to do OK and the poisoned pens will race to bash him. And that is just not necessary. If it is true that Jon is indeed hosting, I pray he rocks the fucking house, for his sake.

In other related news, the vitriolic and downright nasty comments on the LA Times page just appalled me. I know that the LA Times is a relatively conservative newspaper (I wouldn't read their coverage of US or Middle East politics if you paid me), the anti-Semitic bent of their readers was a total shock.
Like Jon, hate Jon just leave your "Jews control Hollywood" at home.