I've Been Busy... Watching Television

That's not meant as a joke. (Although it is kinda funny.)

I have been knee-deep in some fascinating TV and movie watching. TV is centered around Six Feet Under. HBO2 is running the entire series run following the end of the series last fall. Everyweek night at 8 an episode airs and we've watched almost fifty hours already. Any episodes missed we catch through (*cough*) other means and so I've been able to watch everything in a very fast fashion.

I love doing this, "marathoning" as I call it. I did it with Stargate SG1 and other HBO classics like Oz and The Wire. When you watch episodes back to back like this, you get an almost surreal view of the show. It creeps into your thoughts and you relate to every character's ups and downs more than a traditional viewing. It feels like you're on the rollercoaster ride with them. As for Six Feet Under, it is just a brilliantly written, charming, nuiscaned, and fascinating look at modern life. Relationships, drugs, and especially death, are so vividly protrayed, it's a joy and eye-opener to watch. It's been great enterainment and, more importantly, wonderful inspiration.

And Shawn and I have joined the Netflix revolution. We love it. Love watching more than a dozen random and disparate movies in under a month, some we've been meaning to watch for years, some we never heard of until we saw it, some clearly mainstream, most, refreshingly, not. Some highlights: Everything is Illuminated based off the novel by Johnathan Safran Foer. Gorgeous, hilarious, heartbreaking film. Jarhead, Sam Mendes' war film that borrows heavily in tone and structure from Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. And a weird, powerful and sad film called The Squid and The Whale, a extremely realistic portrayal of a family undergoing a divorce in the mid 80's and all the hardship and pain that goes with that, before divorce became as common as showering in the morning.