Cultcha

An evening out, sans enfants (oder ohne kinder, si vous préférez). Dinner and a movie. Dinner, sorta the usual thing at a usual place, peaceful, pleasant and early. Had a view of one of the main roads out that way, and was stunned by how many bicyclists I saw during the course of our dinner. There's definitely more of the spandex-clad crowd in Bethlehem than in East Greenbush. Then, movie. Timing arrival at The Spectrum has always been an iffy thing -- it can take much longer or much less time than one expects, and there is simply nowhere around there to go to kill time. The theater has always served great desserts, but there's nowhere to eat them but in the theaters. Happily, the owners have opened up the Ultraviolet Cafe next door, which is quite nice. Great place to chat before a movie, have a cup of coffee and some lemon cake. Brilliant idea, and I hope they keep it going. Plus, they started off the evening right for me by playing Mazzy Star. It's hard to have a bad time when Hope Sandoval is singing to you.

Saw "Broken Flowers," Jim Jarmusch's latest. One review I saw said Bill Murray's performance here made his acting in "Lost in Translation" look frenetic. That's about right. It was a movie of long scenes, editing themes, motion without resolution. (A lot of it shot in lower upstate NY and northern NJ, so the settings all looked oddly familiar.) We're presented with a man whose life really hasn't come to much, and he goes off on a journey. Unlike "About a Boy" or a million other "how to redeem a man" movies, his journey doesn't come to much, and in the end he's unchanged. Man, did that piss off the audience we were with. Me, I liked it. (And the soundtrack was killer, as one would expect from Jarmusch. In fact, I've already added it to my iTunes.)