Sleep Spent

I should have been listening to Ben Folds for years. Instead, I only really began to appreciate his music and sense of humor this year. I’ve been making up for lost time recently, and BF5 and Counting Crows have been figuring prominently in my listening habits. My favorite songs at the moment are Philosophy, Underground and Fred Jones Part 2.

And yes, this marks the return of the Song of the Week page. I still don’t have my hard drive back, but I’ve figured out how to get songs off my iPod, so we’ll see how long I can last on just that.

I went to see Mystic River tonight with my family, and I loved it! It received a bevy of 100s on Metacritic and (currently) an 8.1 on IMDb; that’s usually a good sign. The acting was really what did it for me in this movie. I really believed Sean Penn was a hard core ex-con and Tim Robbins was a man still dealing with an incident of child abuse 25 years earlier.

For my money, in fact, Tim Robbins gave the best performance here. His character seemed a bit slow as a kid, and Tim retained enough of that feel to make the link clear. And yet, he surprised me with his intelligence several times. He didn’t take kindly to being treated like a simpleton. He was a man who had it together much of the time, but preferred to stay quiet. Sometimes, though, he couldn’t deal with life and went a little crazy.

The movie wasn’t without its flaws, like this bizarre and quite unexpected Lady Macbeth speech from one of the actresses. She had said almost nothing the whole movie and then came out with that... it was just weird.

Still, I seriously dug the movie. It was one of those films where, after it was over, I just wanted to sit there and bask in the catharsis and the music during the credits.

See it.