Contagion, Arizona Rain, & Taylor Swift

We just saw Contagion with Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, and Gwyneth Paltrow, and I must say the film wasn’t contagious. There just wasn’t much of a story, with a plot hanging by a thread to Damon and his wife’s and sons’s deaths early in the worldwide contagion. The rest of it showed us how the disease spread to catastrophic proportions with panic and looting in the major cities. I like all those actors and was hoping this film would be worth seeing. It wasn’t. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this disappointed by a movie. The only memorable quote: “Blogging isn’t writing. It’s just graffiti with punctuation.” So, I guess I’m graffitiing and punctuating as I go.

Yesterday, our skies were dark with wind blowing and clouds scudding across from south to north. And then it rained a bit. A typical Arizona rain, about three hundred drops rattling off our patio roof, then subsiding to twenty or thirty a minute. Then gone. Our rains here are mostly in such rapid cells that nothing much happens. A low will form off the Pacific over Los Angeles or San Diego, then circle in to Arizona with winds swinging counter-clockwise, picking up additional moisture as it passes over the Sea of Cortez, then swooping up from the south. Almost never a gray-dripper such as we were used to in western New York. Now, that was rain . . . and rain . . . and rain. I guess I’d like to have something in the middle of those two extremes. Someday, we’ll be able to control the weather enough that I could have my wish.

I’ve written about this young woman before, but we just saw her again on Ellen’s opening shows for her ninth season. Taylor Swift is the young woman. She impresses me more each time I see her. Not for her singing, although she’s very good. It’s for her presence. She seems like such a capable and unassuming person, still in a sort of gangling, coltish way. I’ve already said I thought she was going to be the next super star and I want to say it again. She looks remarkably like a young Grace Kelly; she has the same charisma that Barbra had when she was first doing that series of television musicals; she has the same charm and likeability as we saw in Julia Roberts when she hit us in the face with Pretty Woman. Taylor Swift will soon hit us in the same way, only not in the musical business—in film. Just wait and see.