Back to the Same Again

So I'm as pale as a cloud on a summer day. My head is foggy, my chest is thick and wet (yum!), and I'm coughing up lots of icky stuff. Hooray! I'm sick, AGAIN. So I spent yesterday morning trying to go to work, giving up by around noon, coming home and watching movies. For hours. I felt too bad to even read for that long.

I watched Things Behind the Sun, directed by Allison Anders. It's a wonderful independent film about a woman who was gang raped (I know, sounds uplifting) when she was fourteen, and has never moved past the event in her life. She's a musician, and when her record starts moving up the charts, a music magazine wants to interview her. Only the journalist is the brother of the ring leader of the boys who raped her.

The movie frankly deals with the broken nature of Sherry, and Owen, the journalist, has his own troubles sexually as a result of what happened when he was a kid. There are deep psychological implications, and they reverberate in everything the two have done since they were fourteen; the broken souls are intelligently and almost wistfully explored in the film. It stars Kim Dickens as Sherry and Gabriel Mann as Owen. Oh, and Don Cheadle, the most underrated actor in Hollywood (IMHO), plays Sherry's manager / lover, and he's excellent as well. I've been wanting to see the movie for ages, and I'm glad it was as good as I'd read it was.

Then I watched Maria Full of Grace, and it was okay, very disturbing, but good. By then I was almost dizzy from too much television and sort of blacked out until after dinner. Annnywaaay. I'm starting to use this crazy Zip.ca membership, but I'm not sure if it's worth the money I'm paying for it. I'll give it another couple of months and let you know.