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I love my job
Monday, April 2 2012
I'd been working for something like three weeks on an incredibly difficult project that had forced me to wade into incomprehensible database designs and the even-less-comprehensible Amazon Web Services API. It's the kind of work that leads me to take extra good care of my tomato plants (some of which are now in bloom) and assiduously rid the yard of dog turds. But then today I had a phone meeting about a more urgent project, one that would have me build a data migration tool. And just like that I could put that bad old project on the back burner to work on something that promised to be much more fun. I love my job, if only because such turns of event have a chance of happening.
This evening Gretchen and I watched the new Miranda July film entitled The Future, which Nancy and Sarah the Vegan had given bad reviews. The Future is about creative block, getting stuck in ruts, midlife crisis, and the pursuit of excitement and meaning in the face of the same old same old. It started out promising, full of all the rich quirkiness that makes thinking people love Miranda July. Somewhere along the line, though, the movie began to grate. At first this was only in the scenes where a partial cat puppet (obviously voiced by Miranda July) complained from her cage about not being adopted by our July's character and that character's boyfriend. (The puppet, whose paws were actually July's gloved hands, was way out of scale for the water dish and newspaper lining the cage.) But then July's character decides to shake up her life by having an affair, and there was a deliberately-awkward sex scene where July's character gets it from behind. It was a little like watching one of my aunts doing it doggy style with my childhood friend. The last quarter or so of The Future is total mush, and when it mercifully ends, there's no sense of conclusion; it's just a cinematic whimper of nothingness. I once sat through a film (The Others starring Nicole Kidman) that was almost unwatchable until the last ten minutes, but those last ten minutes were brilliant, and so I came away from the experience liking the film. With the Future, it was the exact opposite. The film wasn't terrible until the final quarter, but because that part is freshest in my memory, I'm left thinking the whole thing was dreadful. And Gretchen liked it even less than I did. I think she rated it one star on Netflix.
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