Weekend Update; The Hurt Locker; Lost v. White House;

Hey there. Happy Monday.
Hope everyone had a good weekend. Mine was pretty good.
Friday night I went to a happy hour for a co-worker who's leaving our office. Saturday I mostly hung out with Ryan and Jamie. Last night I had band practice with Mono Ensemble, and we sounded pretty decent for a bunch of guys who haven't had many chances to play in the last few months. After the game I hung out with Reed and watched the Vikings lose to the Saints in overtime. We only saw the end of the game (part of the 4th quarter and into overtime), but it seemed like a hard fought game. As Reed pointed out (Reed being a lifetime Vikings fan), those sorts of losses are just tough on the Vikings because, in spite of never having won a Super Bowl (I'm pretty sure that's right) the Vikings have had a lot of really good teams over the years and have seemed poised to go and win one many, many times.
Anyway, every year is tough in the NFL and there are certainly no guarantees, but if the vikings can essentially reassemble the same team again, I would think that they can probably make another strong run again next year.

What else? I saw The Hurt Locker this weekend with Ryan and Jamie. For those who haven't seen it or heard about it, The Hurt Locker is a movie about a bomb squad in Iraq that spends the majority of its time disarming IEDS (i.e., improvised explosive devices- roadside bombs used by the Iraqi insurgency to blow up American vehicles and troops). The Hurt Locker was a decent movie, but it's been getting really rave reviews, with lots of people talking about how it's the best and most realistic movie about the Iraq war that's been made so far. I thought it was a pretty good movie, and it definitely felt very authentic in terms of setting and look and feel, but it also had sort of your standard loose cannon, hotshot, make my own rules sort of protagonist that we've seen time and time again, and, frankly, his behavior sort of brought the realism of the movie into question as much or more than anything else (this guy has supposedly already disarmed over 800 bombs when we've seem his engage in recklessness that's brought him within a hair's breath of getting killed like 5 times during the course of this two hour movie?). Anyway, Hurt Locker had a realistic look and feel, but I'm not sure that Hurt Locker was much more than an action movie that happened to look pretty authentic. That being said, it was a good action movie. I'm just saying that In the Valley of Elah and Stop Loss were both movies about the Iraq War that did a better job of raising important questions about the war (and I thought Valley of Elah was actually a very well executed movie). And there are almost certainly other Iraq War movies that I'm not even thinking of. Hurt Locker, while really intense, was, in some strange way, probably a more entertaining movie than these prior movies, though.
So... long story short- Hurt Locker was a good movie, but I'm just not sure it lived up to all of the extremely high critical praise I'd been reading about it. I would have undoubtedly been much more pleasantly surprised if I'd walked into this movie knowing little or nothing about it.

What else? Well, I avoided all the news shows this weekend. I didn't really feel like hearing them talk about all of the mistakes by Democrats that led up to the recent loss in Massachusetts and the subsequent failure of any sort of meaningful health care reform. Meanwhile, the American public has successfully lobbied the White House to make sure that the president's upcoming State of the Union address doesn't conflict with the season premier of Lost (because God knows they can't reschedule Lost). So.... the same public that the White House is constantly pandering to and living in constant fear of is also a group of people whose priorities put the president's plans for the future of our country at a level of importance that's somewhere beneath the activities of a bunch of attractive actors on an imaginary, disappearing island. I'm not really saying these things to criticize Lost so much as I'm pointing out that maybe the Democrats should just do the right thing from time to time instead of kowtowing to a public that's more attuned to bright lights and shiny baubles than to the overall condition and direction of the country.
We're a willfully ignorant country (and sometimes the only way to convince people that something works is to show them that it can work).
Okay. Must stop before rant gets out of control (again).

Well, that's about it for now.
Hope this is the start of a good week!