A Tale of Two Movies

I finally snapped out of my slump once Matt got home yesterday. We made a big creamy pot of tomato soup, which was delicious, and went out and rented a free movie (thanks, Redbox!).

Unsure of what to rent, we went with Cleaner, a movie neither of us could remember hearing much about but which looked like it had, at least, a somewhat promising cast. Samuel L. Jackson is always a favorite, and Ed Harris is generally pretty good too.

We ended up loving it! Samuel L. Jackson plays a retired cop who runs a business cleaning up crime scenes. While a little stomach-turning at times due to the nature of the main character's line of work, it was nothing we couldn't handle, and the thing I liked most about it was that it was a smart, suspenseful drama (actually quite sad at times) without being overly violent or scary. It also had unusual and interesting cinematography. We'd definitely recommend it!

Today, I slept most of the day away, which isn't terrible considering I'm supposed to work overnight tomorrow night and which also leads me to believe I'm still fighting off the tail end of my cold. Matt graciously allowed me to do so and buzzed around the apartment, sewing diapers and doing other little odds and ends around the apartment. We also went and worked out, and switched from recumbent bikes (which we've been doing, but which is getting harder for me as my lap is getting smaller) to upright bikes, which we both enjoyed. It felt good to work out again after a hiatus of a week or so, and we're hoping to get back in the swing of things now.

Then for a movie at the other end of the spectrum. We'd seen trailers for Fireproof and were cautiously optimistic about it. While we consider ourselves serious Christians, we've both found the Christian art/movie/music scene, for the most part, to be...uh...lame. But this one looked like it might actually be pretty good, and so we were hopeful, and happy to see that Redbox had it in.

We only made it through the first 20 minutes. From the get-go, the acting was very contrived--which we were willing to overlook, if not for the terrible fighting scenes between the married couple who are apparently the protagonists of the movie. Shoving, screaming, name-calling--there are ways to get marital tension across without shoving it down our throats for fifteen minutes at a stretch, and personally I found it more gratuitous and upsetting then a lot of similar scenes in "secular" movies. It was so unnerving to both of us that we finally just looked at each other and agreed to turn it off. Whatever redemption ultimately came for these two wasn't really worth putting ourselves through the stress of watching them get there, and with laborious acting on top of that. So that was our experience of that movie--disappointing.