People Like Us & The Open

We decided to see People Like Us despite the luke-warm reviews, and we both liked it, just as we so often do when we see films with critically luke-warm reviews. Most reviewers took issue with the sort of sleazy character Chris Pine portrayed for the first half of the movie, sort of a fast-talking loser who didn’t want to return to California for his father’s funeral. But he turned it around by the end. I, like a lot of viewers, were wondering how they could possibly resolve the seeming romantic attachment Sam (Chris Pine) had with someone he knew to be his half-sister. I kept thinking that somehow it would be revealed that Frankie (Elizabeth Banks) wasn’t really Jerry Harper’s daughter, that they would surprisingly come together like Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember. Not to be. But that would have been too trite a solution anyway. We both thought it was quite a bit better than Roger Ebert and others had suggested.

Eleven hours of British Open coverage, beginning at 1:30 a.m. That’s early. And that’s a lot of coverage. So I had my dvr record the first four hours, than got up at 5:30 to watch what I’d saved. Good. Tiger was just teeing off when I started watching. And the day was much better than any forecasters were predicting. Tiger played a workmanlike round, following a game plan to the letter, shooting a three under 67 in an almost robotically technical round. As he said in the post interview, he just wanted to be in position, that there was a lot of golf to go, that the typical links wind would probably start blowing and the greens would speed up in the next three days. I think he’s right. And I think he’ll probably shoot three more technically good rounds to win by three.