Twenty-One Consecutive Days Indoors

I was able to watch two movies yesterday through our T9 Android 8.1 TV Box ─ and likely the Cinema HD 'app' that I have downloaded into it. This 'app' seems to do a better job of locating sources than do the other nine of so that I have in the device. 

The first movie was one I attempted to watch late in the morning with my younger brother. However, the 2009 feature The Exploding Girl was too dreary for him, and about 15 minutes into it he grumbled that it clearly was not going to get any better. ("This is as good as it's going to get!")

I bore with the movie for about 25 minutes before giving it up for his sake, although I also found it dreadfully pointless. In fact, this excerpt from one review is superbly accurate:

There’s a fine line between naturalism and tedium, and The Exploding Girl approaches it too often. [Bradley Rust] Gray fills the movie with long scenes of people walking around the city, not saying much, which would be okay if the few actual dialogue scenes weren’t so blandly functional. [Lead actress Zoe] Kazan makes a few pointed calls to her monotone fella—who doesn’t disguise his dimming ardor ....  

That quote is from the Film.AVclub.com article The Exploding Girl.

I now forget just why, but I have been slowly working my way through Zoe Kazan's credited movies. I looked at Wikipedia's list of her films, but none of them seem to me to stand out as having showcased her to such degree that I felt compelled to see as many of her movies as I am able to find ─ unless it was her segment ("The Gal Who Got Rattled") in the 2018 Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. 

Very late in the afternoon, or early into the evening, I returned to the movie and finished watching the remainder of it while my brother was away somewhere drinking.

He didn't miss anything. And it had the sort of ending I detest ─ no ending. That is, it ended without anything definitive having taken place.

The final scene was of Zoe's character commuting with her guy friend from their home town back to college from whence they had been on a break ─ the two are riding together in the back seat of a car, if I remember correctly, and she is seemingly leaning against him in sleep. The movie ends when their fingers slowly interlock into a firm clasp ─ yet the scene could have been a scene from anywhere in the entire movie.

Sure, it could have implied that they were now consciously going to give coupledom a shot, but that implication is only there because it was the final scene of the movie. The scene could easily have taken place anywhere else in the movie and had no significance.

The two were very close. He would sit by her and comfort her when she had an epileptic fit, or when she was just otherwise not feeling well. Any of those scenes could have substituted for that closing scene, and we would have then been left with a similar unfounded assumption that something more was to come of that new replacement 'key' scene ─ key only because of its placement at the end of the movie.

Thankfully the movie was but 1½ hours in duration ─ not two hours like the second movie I was to watch.

I only watched the second movie because my younger brother returned home from his bar visit before the unspoken mid-evening deadline I have for him...but he did so only barely, to my considerable annoyance.

He showed up approximately 8:50 p.m. Had he not been home by 9:00 p.m., I would not have been willing to try and watch any T.V. with him (he doesn't have any facility at operating our Android TV Box), and I would have had myself an early evening and gone to bed.

The second movie was one I selected just to try and help keep him from passing out, for he probably would have done so with an episode or two of one of the T.V. series we follow.

The movie was 2014's Kingsman: The Secret Service.

It most definitely served its purpose ─ it was filled with lots of action and derring-do, and  it also had a pretty darned good blending of storylines. 

I vaguely recall seeing scenes of the deadly, legless villainess (played by actress Sofia Boutella) in excerpted fight sequences that were advertising the movie back when it was first in theatres.

As sensational and even frightening as Sofia's villainess could be, I felt that the actress portraying the lead character's mother was under-featured. To me, she was gorgeous, and it made no sense that she would have descended so far in life since the death of her novitiate Kingsman husband 19 years before that she would have ended up in a sick and punishing romantic relationship with a brutish gang leader.

The actress I am referring to is Samantha Womack, who ─ as Samantha Janus ─ represented England in the 1991 Eurovision Song Contest with the song "A Message to Your Heart" (YouTube).

Incidentally, I picked that movie because I was intending to watch its sequel; and upon learning that this prequel existed, I decided that it would be inexcusable not to watch this movie first.

So the sequel is likely next up for us to watch within two or three days. 

Anyway, as usual, my brother and I were to watch T.V. well into the midnight hour, but I was to bed well ahead of 1:00 a.m.

I hope that my brother remains with his girlfriend Bev this evening, and spends the night at her home as he often does at the finish of his Saturdays. I want nothing to do with another late night, for I want to get out early tomorrow morning to do some grocery shopping at a store a mile from here that opens at 7:00 a.m.

I detest going anywhere once the day dawns and becomes busy.

Hell, I need to get out! I have not walked so much as a block in what will be exactly three weeks come tomorrow morning. That was also a grocery expedition, but of a greater distance. 

I do not drive, so I just about always walk everywhere I go locally. However, I have been too broke to be able to do any shopping; and it is impossible for me to walk anywhere hereabouts merely for pleasure. 

So I have remained shut up here inside my home, a virtual helpless prisoner of utterly crushing debt and my unwanted urban environment.

I want to close with something more positive ─ the following "stylized" image that Google Photos created from a photo I uploaded two days ago into a Google Photos album:

This is the original photo:

The photo is of Wat Pa Phu Kon in Udon Thani, Thailand.

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