Christmas Carols and Invictus

I've been away for nearly a week, and I still have almost nothing to say. I've run headfirst into that wall again--the old writer's block. The days come and go and nothing seems to happen, or nothing occurs to me to write about. There's always Christmas, but that's been overdone, and I'd just be saying the same old thing. You know, "can't wait to get it over with; can't stand the social obligations; can't wait to stop hearing really dumb Christmas songs everywhere you go.” The old uglies, like "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth," "Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer," and now a new ugly, "Dominique, the Christmas Donkey." Can't wait for this month to be over.

One thing does come to mind to write about, a quick movie review. We saw Invictus with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon yesterday. We were both hoping it would be a good one--inspirational, uplifting, well-acted. It wasn't. There has been some talk about Morgan Freeman giving an Oscar-worthy performance as Nelson Mandela. Ain't gonna happen. He looked amazingly like Mandela, he spoke in a halting Mandela way, he smiled and he smiled, supposedly as Mandela did to win over the white population of South Africa. But as for acting, certainly not worth an Oscar bid. Then there was a beefed-up Matt Damon playing the captain of the S.A. rugby team. A bunch of grunts and long introspective looks to show that he was thinking about the thirty years Mandela had spent in prison. And lots of shots of him leading his teammates on training runs. And finally, the series of rugby matches leading to the title game in the World Cup. It might have been better if American audiences knew more about rugby. Soccer was described as a hooligans’ game played by gentlemen, and rugby as a gentlemen’s game played by hooligans. So we had any number of scrums with all the lardass players shoving each other around, and way more than we needed to see of Matt with his cheek pressed against the ass of one of his competitors as he joined in the shoving. It was worthy of laughter instead of tears. I think maybe Clint Eastwood is past his prime as a director, allowing such heavy-handed scenes where blacks and whites joined together in their joy over the World Cup victory, with the ugliness of apartheid almost instantaneously laid to rest. I can't imagine it happened as quickly as Clint would have us believe. We wanted the movie to be better, but it wasn't worth even the three stars our local reviewer gave it. How about two stars?

Oh, hell, a grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart. And, a hole has been found in a nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.

Happy Christmas Eve Eve Eve.