Hudson on Up
Marisa and I took a short vacation upstate this past week, and I think what made it a vacation and not just a trip upstate was that we didn't get that much sleep, like when you're in a new place and you don't want to miss anything by sleeping in (and I really mean "you," because I probably do actually want to sleep in anyway).
We worked our way to Saratoga slowly. First, Marisa had a work mission to stay at an inn in Cold Spring and see Hamlet at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, so we did that.
I feel like I got a decent and very cheap sampling of plays-actually-performed at Wesleyan because there were always two or three plays per weekend, but I'm not sure if I've ever seen a Shakespeare play performed on stage and not on film. I definitely haven't seen Hamlet on stage, nor have I really read it carefully, either, because when I took a Shakespeare course at Wes, the Hamlet test happened to be the same week the film series showed the four-hour unabridged Branagh movie, so that took care of that. This production wasn't really modernize (although the costumes were) so much as minimalized. The guys playing Hamlet, Claudius, and Polonius were pretty strong, and the production made nice use of the outdoor stage, having characters enter from a quarter-mile outside the performance space, from the distance. Also, I didn't wait in line all day to see it, so suck it, Shakespeare in the Park!
After leaving Cold Spring, we made two stops in the vicinity of Poughkeepsie:
Storm King, an outdoor art museum/installation that is kind of amazing, and the vastness of which cannot really be conveyed by a couple of photos:
... and the Walkway over the Hudson, mid-state New York's answer to the High Line; a former train bridge repurposed as a park/walkway. It has less stuff than the High Line, but it does have the Hudson River.
Then we got to Saratoga, had dinner with my mom, saw Rob and Sabrina and Jason and my sister, went to bed, and got up early to get Lando's brakes looked at. They're OK now! It's kind of a bummer, though, that we don't live near anything like Union Coachworks, the auto-repair shop in downtown Saratoga. Obviously I have little experience dealing with auto-repair people but these guys seemed really on the ball and particularly non-crooky.
It's not unusual for me to eat a lot when I go upstate, and I did this weekend from meals at the inn through Father's Day brunch with my dad and sibs, but something else that sometimes happens upstate is I somehow wind up spending way more money on frivolous things than I do when in the city. For example: between dinner and a movie, Rob and Sabrina and my brother and Marisa and I went to the Toys R Us in Clifton Park. As someone whose mom works in a local toy store, I should not endorse Toys R Us, but we killed a lot of time there in high school, and because of that, it wounds me how much the Toys R Us in Manhattan sucks. Tourists go to this store in Times Square like it's an attraction, which is strange because they mob around to get into a big store that carries about as many toys as the Toys R Us closest to them, and has a couple of robot dinosaurs which, admittedly, are pretty cool, but seriously, if you want to just look at a bunch of cool toys, don't go to the Toys R Us in Times Square, go to the Toys R Us in Clifton Park on a Friday night. Anyway, they were having a Lego sale, and while even on sale Legos are kind of overpriced (I don't know how my parents dealt with my childhood-long Lego addiction), I figured this was probably the cheapest I could likely get a couple of small Lego sets with tiny Lego Jack Sparrow and tiny Lego Dobby.
I actually have mixed feelings about the proliferation of movie-based Lego sets, but I figure (a.) as my brother pointed out, it's pretty cool that they still have plenty of Town sets and such (Town as in Town/Castle/Space/Pirate, not Lego sets of the movie The Town, although I might be into that), and (b.) are "castle" and "pirate" all that different from Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean? What's weirder is that among those movie-related sets, I don't have any Star Wars Legos handy, apart from the Lego Yoda keychain Sara C gave me years and years ago. Looking in the store, I figured out why: almost all of the Star Wars Lego sets that cost less than $25 or so lack any actual Star Wars characters: just clone troopers and... well, pretty much just clone troopers. Maybe some Gungans. The Potter/Pirates sets were far less greedy about that stuff (even if you don't consider Dobby a great find, the set I got also included tiny Lego Harry Potter).
Anyway, the point is, I spent money on Legos this weekend, something I haven't done in many years, possibly ever (they were go-to Christmas and birthday presents when I was a kid; I don't remember ever buying sets with my allowance, although maybe I did). I also bought (not at Toys R Us):
--Pants.
--a Mountain Goats EP I don't have, but seriously, who buys EPs any more anyway? Side note: I'm may soon actually run out of Mountain Goats CDs to buy. I promise I won't get on eBay thereafter trolling for bootlegs or whatever.
--a Mountain Goats album I do have, but it was only three dollars so I just bought it and left it at Rob's. If every used CD was three dollars, I would do this constantly, so it's probably a good thing that they're not.
--James Cameron DVDs. I texted Rob to let him know that I bought two James Cameron movies at the old-people yard sale across from his house. He immediately guessed The Abyss and True Lies and was completely right. He hadn't stopped at the sale beforehand. He just knew. I realize this also means I now own every James Cameron movie except the first Terminator, unless you also count Piranha 2.
--Two other DVDs at that yard sale: The Crow and the 1976 King Kong. The latter was Marisa's idea because we have the other two King Kongs and this one was only a dollar and I haven't seen it. It did prompt the question of whether this was the worst movie we have on DVD. We'll see how it stands up to the second side of the four-Batman-movie flip-disc: Batman Forever and Batman & Robin.
--Socks and a shirt at Target. I'm not proud.
--So much root beer.
A weekend in Manhattan, that would've been a couple of movie tickets and maybe some Shake Shack. At least the movie tickets are cheaper up there. The movie the five of us were on our way to see was Green Lantern. My expectations were not high and it's not the worst superhero movie I've seen, and yet it's kind of a disappointment nonetheless. The ads play up the otherworldly craziness of the Green Lantern Corps, but the movie itself is unlike Thor on two counts: one, it does not contain a surprising amount of otherworldly effects-heavy stuff, and probably spends substantially more time on earthbound matters; and two, the otherworldly effects-heavy stuff is far more engaging than the earthbound matters, which were surprisingly enjoyable, even preferable, in Thor. Out in space, you get weird-looking Green Lanterns from crazy alien universes. Down on Earth, you get Ryan Reynolds having daddy issues and, off to the side, a pretty awesome Peter Sarsgaard performance as a villain who the story considers secondary to a giant cloud. Side question: why hire Ryan Reynolds to play the Green Lantern and only sort of hint at him being kind of a wiseass? I don't really have a problem with Reynolds and he can probably work outside of his comfort zone, but it's not as if Hal Jordan is written as a complex or interesting character in lieu of the typical Reynolds Chevy-Chase-joins-a-gym-and-a-frat shtick, so it would've been nice if he had at least had a handful of funny lines. Instead, he has these boilerplate internal conflicts about responsibility and living up to his father's legacy and not running away and the balance between fear and fearlessness and all of this other stupid, listless shit that makes Thor look even better than the pretty-good silly movie it was.
Here's a measure of the movie's clumsiness: It's about a character who predates many other popular superheroes, but in the movie version, he comes off like a selective rip-off of Spider-Man and Iron Man. The movie also had a vaguely nineties quality to it, like those post-Batman, pre-X-Men comics adaptations that didn't quite know what to do with themselves and threw a lot of special effects money shots that aren't that money. I mean, look, Green Lantern is not unwatchable. It's a passable way to kill a couple of hours. I'm certainly glad to have seen it with Rob and Sabrina and Andrew and Marisa while eating candy and trying not to laugh too hard at Marisa trying not to laugh too hard at Peter Sarsgaard's crazy screaming. But it's too bad that the first big non-Batman non-Superman DC comics hero to get a movie only narrowly escapes Fantastic Four (movie) territory because at least they cast pretty much all good actors in this one, even if they don't actually use them. And to follow up the Ryan Reynolds question, I can't figured out why Martin Campbell, who brought real, practical old-movie craft to the likes of The Mask of Zorro and Casino Royale, wanted to do a boilerplate fantastical space adventure/origin tale without the clarity of either story thread. But he did. The result is an actual superhero movie that's not nearly as good a superhero movie as The Mask of Zorro.
We could've seen Green Lantern at the drive-in, and while quality-wise that would've been perfectly fitting, I'm so glad we didn't, because we had Jeff and Amy plus Anne S and Aaron along with us, and so they had Super 8 followed by X-Men: First Class at their disposal: the two best, most fun summer movies so far, rather than the most mirthless (well, if you count Priest as a January movie to its soul).
Before the drive-in, we had more outdoor fun with Jeff and Amy and Jason and Rob and Sabrina AND Jeff and Amy's adorable children. I assume all children are not this much fun. Swings and gazebos for all!
There was also grilling at Rob's, coffee cake with my mom, brunch with my dad, Target with my sister, Rock Band at Rob's, etc. Maybe when we go back for Labor Day we can sleep in. And eat ice cream.
We worked our way to Saratoga slowly. First, Marisa had a work mission to stay at an inn in Cold Spring and see Hamlet at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, so we did that.
I feel like I got a decent and very cheap sampling of plays-actually-performed at Wesleyan because there were always two or three plays per weekend, but I'm not sure if I've ever seen a Shakespeare play performed on stage and not on film. I definitely haven't seen Hamlet on stage, nor have I really read it carefully, either, because when I took a Shakespeare course at Wes, the Hamlet test happened to be the same week the film series showed the four-hour unabridged Branagh movie, so that took care of that. This production wasn't really modernize (although the costumes were) so much as minimalized. The guys playing Hamlet, Claudius, and Polonius were pretty strong, and the production made nice use of the outdoor stage, having characters enter from a quarter-mile outside the performance space, from the distance. Also, I didn't wait in line all day to see it, so suck it, Shakespeare in the Park!
After leaving Cold Spring, we made two stops in the vicinity of Poughkeepsie:
Storm King, an outdoor art museum/installation that is kind of amazing, and the vastness of which cannot really be conveyed by a couple of photos:
... and the Walkway over the Hudson, mid-state New York's answer to the High Line; a former train bridge repurposed as a park/walkway. It has less stuff than the High Line, but it does have the Hudson River.
Then we got to Saratoga, had dinner with my mom, saw Rob and Sabrina and Jason and my sister, went to bed, and got up early to get Lando's brakes looked at. They're OK now! It's kind of a bummer, though, that we don't live near anything like Union Coachworks, the auto-repair shop in downtown Saratoga. Obviously I have little experience dealing with auto-repair people but these guys seemed really on the ball and particularly non-crooky.
It's not unusual for me to eat a lot when I go upstate, and I did this weekend from meals at the inn through Father's Day brunch with my dad and sibs, but something else that sometimes happens upstate is I somehow wind up spending way more money on frivolous things than I do when in the city. For example: between dinner and a movie, Rob and Sabrina and my brother and Marisa and I went to the Toys R Us in Clifton Park. As someone whose mom works in a local toy store, I should not endorse Toys R Us, but we killed a lot of time there in high school, and because of that, it wounds me how much the Toys R Us in Manhattan sucks. Tourists go to this store in Times Square like it's an attraction, which is strange because they mob around to get into a big store that carries about as many toys as the Toys R Us closest to them, and has a couple of robot dinosaurs which, admittedly, are pretty cool, but seriously, if you want to just look at a bunch of cool toys, don't go to the Toys R Us in Times Square, go to the Toys R Us in Clifton Park on a Friday night. Anyway, they were having a Lego sale, and while even on sale Legos are kind of overpriced (I don't know how my parents dealt with my childhood-long Lego addiction), I figured this was probably the cheapest I could likely get a couple of small Lego sets with tiny Lego Jack Sparrow and tiny Lego Dobby.
I actually have mixed feelings about the proliferation of movie-based Lego sets, but I figure (a.) as my brother pointed out, it's pretty cool that they still have plenty of Town sets and such (Town as in Town/Castle/Space/Pirate, not Lego sets of the movie The Town, although I might be into that), and (b.) are "castle" and "pirate" all that different from Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean? What's weirder is that among those movie-related sets, I don't have any Star Wars Legos handy, apart from the Lego Yoda keychain Sara C gave me years and years ago. Looking in the store, I figured out why: almost all of the Star Wars Lego sets that cost less than $25 or so lack any actual Star Wars characters: just clone troopers and... well, pretty much just clone troopers. Maybe some Gungans. The Potter/Pirates sets were far less greedy about that stuff (even if you don't consider Dobby a great find, the set I got also included tiny Lego Harry Potter).
Anyway, the point is, I spent money on Legos this weekend, something I haven't done in many years, possibly ever (they were go-to Christmas and birthday presents when I was a kid; I don't remember ever buying sets with my allowance, although maybe I did). I also bought (not at Toys R Us):
--Pants.
--a Mountain Goats EP I don't have, but seriously, who buys EPs any more anyway? Side note: I'm may soon actually run out of Mountain Goats CDs to buy. I promise I won't get on eBay thereafter trolling for bootlegs or whatever.
--a Mountain Goats album I do have, but it was only three dollars so I just bought it and left it at Rob's. If every used CD was three dollars, I would do this constantly, so it's probably a good thing that they're not.
--James Cameron DVDs. I texted Rob to let him know that I bought two James Cameron movies at the old-people yard sale across from his house. He immediately guessed The Abyss and True Lies and was completely right. He hadn't stopped at the sale beforehand. He just knew. I realize this also means I now own every James Cameron movie except the first Terminator, unless you also count Piranha 2.
--Two other DVDs at that yard sale: The Crow and the 1976 King Kong. The latter was Marisa's idea because we have the other two King Kongs and this one was only a dollar and I haven't seen it. It did prompt the question of whether this was the worst movie we have on DVD. We'll see how it stands up to the second side of the four-Batman-movie flip-disc: Batman Forever and Batman & Robin.
--Socks and a shirt at Target. I'm not proud.
--So much root beer.
A weekend in Manhattan, that would've been a couple of movie tickets and maybe some Shake Shack. At least the movie tickets are cheaper up there. The movie the five of us were on our way to see was Green Lantern. My expectations were not high and it's not the worst superhero movie I've seen, and yet it's kind of a disappointment nonetheless. The ads play up the otherworldly craziness of the Green Lantern Corps, but the movie itself is unlike Thor on two counts: one, it does not contain a surprising amount of otherworldly effects-heavy stuff, and probably spends substantially more time on earthbound matters; and two, the otherworldly effects-heavy stuff is far more engaging than the earthbound matters, which were surprisingly enjoyable, even preferable, in Thor. Out in space, you get weird-looking Green Lanterns from crazy alien universes. Down on Earth, you get Ryan Reynolds having daddy issues and, off to the side, a pretty awesome Peter Sarsgaard performance as a villain who the story considers secondary to a giant cloud. Side question: why hire Ryan Reynolds to play the Green Lantern and only sort of hint at him being kind of a wiseass? I don't really have a problem with Reynolds and he can probably work outside of his comfort zone, but it's not as if Hal Jordan is written as a complex or interesting character in lieu of the typical Reynolds Chevy-Chase-joins-a-gym-and-a-frat shtick, so it would've been nice if he had at least had a handful of funny lines. Instead, he has these boilerplate internal conflicts about responsibility and living up to his father's legacy and not running away and the balance between fear and fearlessness and all of this other stupid, listless shit that makes Thor look even better than the pretty-good silly movie it was.
Here's a measure of the movie's clumsiness: It's about a character who predates many other popular superheroes, but in the movie version, he comes off like a selective rip-off of Spider-Man and Iron Man. The movie also had a vaguely nineties quality to it, like those post-Batman, pre-X-Men comics adaptations that didn't quite know what to do with themselves and threw a lot of special effects money shots that aren't that money. I mean, look, Green Lantern is not unwatchable. It's a passable way to kill a couple of hours. I'm certainly glad to have seen it with Rob and Sabrina and Andrew and Marisa while eating candy and trying not to laugh too hard at Marisa trying not to laugh too hard at Peter Sarsgaard's crazy screaming. But it's too bad that the first big non-Batman non-Superman DC comics hero to get a movie only narrowly escapes Fantastic Four (movie) territory because at least they cast pretty much all good actors in this one, even if they don't actually use them. And to follow up the Ryan Reynolds question, I can't figured out why Martin Campbell, who brought real, practical old-movie craft to the likes of The Mask of Zorro and Casino Royale, wanted to do a boilerplate fantastical space adventure/origin tale without the clarity of either story thread. But he did. The result is an actual superhero movie that's not nearly as good a superhero movie as The Mask of Zorro.
We could've seen Green Lantern at the drive-in, and while quality-wise that would've been perfectly fitting, I'm so glad we didn't, because we had Jeff and Amy plus Anne S and Aaron along with us, and so they had Super 8 followed by X-Men: First Class at their disposal: the two best, most fun summer movies so far, rather than the most mirthless (well, if you count Priest as a January movie to its soul).
Before the drive-in, we had more outdoor fun with Jeff and Amy and Jason and Rob and Sabrina AND Jeff and Amy's adorable children. I assume all children are not this much fun. Swings and gazebos for all!
There was also grilling at Rob's, coffee cake with my mom, brunch with my dad, Target with my sister, Rock Band at Rob's, etc. Maybe when we go back for Labor Day we can sleep in. And eat ice cream.