A rainy, but party weekend.

Just checkin’ in after a busy, but not particularly noteworthy weekend. A few short thoughts…

Mrs. Poolman and I agreed we really should not have pool parties on both days of a two-day weekend. It’s fun, but between the initial clean-up prep for company, entertaining and then the post-gathering clean-up, nothing else gets done and we are pooped. We need to balance things out.

Our friends Lynn and Sam brought their twins (Helen and Brittany, 20 month-old twins) over on Saturday.  A few other friends heard about it and came over too. The cloudy, rainy weather we’ve had for the past two weeks has kept the pool temperature in the low 80s. That’s August-warm for the northeast, but it is ice-bath cold for some thin-blooded Southerners. The girls were perfectly happy to entertain themselves with some sidewalk chalk. I had to blow-out to read at 5:30 mass, but most of the group was still there when I returned.

One of our friends did bring a couple of frozen pizzas over, so that took care of Saturday dinner.

Mrs. P and I watched the second segment of the Swedish version of the Millenium series “The Girl Who Played with Fire” on DVD Saturday night. Actually, I should say that I watched it. Mrs. P fell asleep sitting up before the last opening credits were finished.  Like the first movie in the series, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” I really liked it. The movies follow the books very closely. The actors, especially Noomi Raspace who plays Lisbeth Salandar, are excellent.  Aside from having the dialogue in English, I’m not sure how the next American production (Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara) can do better.

One important note – there are great films for adults, but they are not for children. They are rated “R”. Believe them.

We got up on Sunday and started the clean-up in prep for our second “party” of the weekend. We had long-planned an end-of-the-year party for my fellow CCD teachers. I started the yard and pool clean-up around 10 am and finished up everything I had to do just in time to get a shower in advance of our 3 pm start-time. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate very well. It was cloudy and drizzly off and on, and I think that scared away some of the families from a pool party. As it was, the eight or ten people who came enjoyed themselves, and the kids never got out of the water.

We had a ton of hamburgers and hot dogs left over. Mrs. P called our children and told them there is a free meal available for dinner tonight at our house.

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One weekend — two good movies

Mrs. Poolman and I rented two movies over the weekend, but only got around to watching the the second one last night. At a dollar a day from Blockbuster Express, an extra couple of days on the rental isn’t a big deal.

In an earlier post, I described  “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” I really liked the American movie, although I wasn’t entirely happy with the way the movie ended differently than the book. In 2009, before Hollywood discovered Mikael and Lisbeth, the Swedes made movies from all of the Steig Larsson ‘s three novels.  We rented “The Girl..” and watched it on Saturday.  I thought it was as good, if not better, than the Hollywood version (Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, etc.).  Of course, the actors in the Swedish movie speak Swedish. Duh. So you have to watch it with the English subtitles. I have hearing problems. I usually watch most TV with the closed captioning on anyway, so this was perfectly natural for me.

The only problem I had with the movie is the actress cast in the role of Lisbeth Salander. She is supposed to be 24 years old and looks like she is 14. In the books this becomes an issue at some points in the story. The actress who plays Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) is 32 and pretty much looks it. (I also have issues with TV shows like Glee, in which actors who are clearly in their late-20s are cast to play high school students. Don’t they ever graduate?)

It’s a very good film. If you have read the book and enjoyed it, take a shot at this version of the movie before watching the US version.

The second movie we watched was far outside our usual viewing patterns – the 2010 teenage vampire movie “Let Me In.”  Since I am not an adolescent girl, I have not been bitten by the vampire movie bug. I saw the first movie of the Twilight series, only because my daughter cajoled me into going with her, and I don’t think I have ever watched “True Blood.” Not since Bela Lugosi lurked the castles of Transylvania have I cared much about blood suckers.

I ran across “Let Me In” while browsing movie rentals on line, and I remembered a review I had read when it first came out, along with a profile of one of the leads, Chloë Grace Moretz.  So I thought, “What the heck?” and gave it a shot.

Chloë plays, Abby, a 12-year old girl living with her father in a Los Alamos apartment complex. She meets her next door neighbor, Owen, a much-bullied boy her age. They meet and get along, but the twist is that Chloë is a vampire who needs to drink blood in order to survive. Her father isn’t really her father. He is a vampire too. He goes out into the community at night to kill and drain blood to feed his “daughter.” One of these blood-draining expeditions goes awry and the story spins from there.

The script is well written and both Chloë and Kodi Smit-McPhee  (Owen) did a great job, especially for a couple of young kid actors.

“Let Me In” is a little different, but I thought it was very good. The vampires are not painted as monsters, but rather as a pair of people just doing what they need to do to survive. The friendship between Abby/Chloë and Owen is cute. The end of the movie has an interesting twist that I won’t give away.

Bottom line – I really enjoyed the move and I’m glad we watched it. It’s definitely worth your time.