Moving to the right coast

J and I have arrived in our new town.... We're in a bizarre state of limbo where I have to work, but have no office; and we can paint the walls in the new apartment, but can't move in. Intellectually, I know that this would happen, but from an emotive / instinctive level, I still find it oddly upsetting to be so rootless.

We are staying at a friend's house, and he has basically rented us a room for the time being. It won't be much longer now before we will be allowed to actually occupy our new place, except for the fact that all our furniture and other worldly possessions are... somewhere in a truck, toodling along across the country at a nice, leisurely pace (in short, I have no idea where it is).

Then there is the matter of my cats, which are bumping along in their individual kennels, riding in my car with J's dad and brother, somewhere in the vasty wildernesses. I miss them a lot, and I hope they make it across safely.

The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos)

I was utterly enthralled by the story, both the past and the present. We debated the events depicted in the film the whole ride home. The Secret in Their Eyes leaves you with countless implications, and lets you sift through them until you, like the main character, arrive at the inescapable truth (although ymmv).

In short, it's good. It's complicated. Go see it. :)

Avatar: The Last Airbender

M. Night Shyamalan EPIC FAIL.

I can't remember the last time I saw a movie this bad. I hope MST3K riff-tracks it soon, because that's the only way anyone can be reasonably expected to watch this horrible monstrosity.

The actors were atrocious, the CG removed from reality, the plot line divorced from all sense of plausibility.... Need I go on? Give this movie a pass if you value your hard-earned cash.

The only upside to this movie was that it got us out of 4th of July post-fireworks traffic.

Karate Kid

Having immigrated from Beijing to the US when I was roughly the age of the boy, I really empathized deeply with the character. Children can be so cruel.

Jackie Chan plays a creepy old dude pretty well. I wasn't entirely convinced by the car scene, but overall I thought the movie did a fair, faithful adaptation of the original.

Iron Man 2

Definitely not as exciting as the first one. Everything about it screamed gratuitous and overplayed. We guessed the driving plot point before even setting foot in the theater. :p

If you like obvious plot lines jazzed up with lots and lots of explosions, it'll be fun times, but don't expect to be intellectually stimulated. :)

Toy Story 3

To summarize: ♥ !!!

I think Pixar did a really nice job with the end-of-life portion of our toys. Okay, so the fire-and-brimstone portion was a bit gratuitous, but overall, I thought the movie was really sweet.

Go see it! :) Go see it with your friends, and bring that ratty old teddy bear you've held onto for too many years out of sheer sentimentality. Don't forget to give it a hug.

Tokaj is very special

The Tokaj wine country (Tokaj-Hegyalja) is sparsely dotted with little villages clustered near where several rivers branch and join. The wineries in this region are distributed throughout these villages. The villages are somewhere between 2mi to 6mi apart from each other, along fairly fast-traffic, sidewalk-free roads. It is very inconvenient to attempt to walk from one village to another.

There is no taxi.

Let me rephrase this. It is a somewhat dangerous proposition to try and walk between villages... but you can't pay someone to drive you between towns.

This is a baffling case of "you can't get there from here" which had us pretty steamed this morning. The hotel staff informed us of the lack of taxis in Tokaj. The tourism information office was minimally helpful in our endeavor to get from Tokaj up to Tarcal and Mezõzombor. In the end, we decided to cut 2 wineries from our day plan and just visit the one place that was in the next village via the train.

We ended up walking 5 miles total anyway, what with getting to the train station, getting to the wine cellar from the train station, getting back to the train, and then getting home from the train. For comparison, we could have walked the whole way -- dodging cars and tripping over grassy nubs -- a total distance of 13.5 miles.