Unbreakable

Yesterday, I went up to the apartment of my former cow-orker Ben, where he and his roommates were doing the Thanksgiving dinner thing. Ben's roommate Joe seems to do a lot of cooking, and our mutual friend John also cooks, so often John and Joe will put together some large feast, with Ben and/or Joe's wife Lisa putting together something on the side. And they'll invite a bunch of people over for a dinner party. Today they had eight people all together, including themselves. This was actually a bit small compared to their typical parties.

I showed up around 2:30, which as it turns out was rather early, although they don't have set times for their parties. I helped slice a few things, but most just hung out and watched people cook. Several of us were distracted for a while by a puzzle which Ben had picked up for the party: Envision two horseshoes, each end connected with three chain links, forming a closed loop. Now there's a metal ring looped around both pieces of chain, fitting loosely around the chains, but not large enough to pull off of either end of the horseshoes. The trick is to get the ring off of this contraption.

It's pretty clever. John solved it in minutes. I solved it in may ten or fifteen minutes, which is not bad for me. The other folks were stumped for a while, but I think they both got it eventually. Of course, once one person solves it, everyone else has to solve it or else you feel like you've lost face, right?

Anyway, having solved it, the puzzle became a nice device for my to fidget with for much of the evening.

Dinner was served around 5:30, and I think they cooked about three times as much food as eight people could eat. There was a 22-pound turkey, which was very moist and tender. There were two kinds of stuffing, spinach, squash, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and rolls. (I think they particularly overdid it with the stuffing, which they apparently had something like five times as much as they needed.) It was all very good, and everyone was quite full afterwards, which is sort of the point of Thanksgiving in the US.

After dinner and after some washing up was done, we all went out for a walk around the neighborhood, and then came back to have pumpkin pie which Ben had baked, and which was also quite good. Then we spent the evening playing a card game called Pit, which is a pretty good party game of trading cards with other players and generally shouting a lot. I think Ben won, and I came in a close second. It was fun.

Most of us decided to bail around 10:30, probably because we were all getting sleepy from all the food. But it was a fine way to spend Thanksgiving.

Today I woke up and motivated myself to go work out. The Apple fitness center would only be open until 1 pm, but I figured I ought to go work off some of that food I put on yesterday. It turns out that I met John there, and we talked back and forth in between exercises. He suggested a few new exercises I could do. He also said that, having been working out for 18 months now, I'm in the top 1% of all Americans who start working out. (He says most stop going to the club after about six months.)

Afterwards I went over to the office to print out the invitation to a party I'm going to tomorrow, and ambled over to John's office where we played a few rounds of pool. (There's a pool table and also a table tennis board over in his building.) I've never played much pool, and I basically suck. John wiped the floor with me, and only lost the last game because he put the 8-ball in the wrong pocket. I guess he and Anders play semi-regularly.

Later in the afternoon, John, one of his cow-orkers, Bill and I met up met up to see Unbreakable, the latest film from the writer/director of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan, and which also stars Bruce Willis.

Willis plays David Dunne, a one-time promising college football star whose career ended in a car accident. He ended up marrying his sweetheart Megan (Robin Wright Penn) and having a son Jeremy (Spencer Treat Clarke), and becoming a security guard. However, David and Megan are having marital problems, and David is coming back from a job interview in New York when his train derails. Everyone on the train is killed, except David, who doesn't have a scratch on him.

David is soon contacted by comic book art collector Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), who has a bone disease causing him to break bones with great regularity. He's been looking for someone who's the opposite of him, someone who can't be hurt, who never gets sick, who's perhaps been placed on Earth to protect everyone else. He believes David might be that man, and over time, David and Jeremy start to think it might be true.

Unbreakable, in some ways, seems like the darker side of Field of Dreams, with Willis standing in for Kevin Costner as the subdued yet credulous protagonist, and Jackson for James Earl Jones' mentor figure. Both films are meticulously paced and will likely bore some viewers, and both involve encounters with supernatural powers which offer a measure of hope. Heck, both even involve sports

The tone of the imagery immediately differentiates the two films, as Unbreakable is filmed in washed out, grainy colors, with moody, suggestive music covering all the key scenes. And Unbreakable also approaches its subject matter in the most oblique way, examining the effects of David's "powers" gradually and never head-on (one powerful scene involves Jeremy holding his father's loaded gun on David). It's also interesting to compare David to the comic book heroes of Elijah's collection, and the extent to which David shares their inner qualities without sharing their exterior flamboyance.

Like Superman, Unbreakable has a fatal flaw: It doesn't explore any of its themes deeply enough. What David turns out to be is examined briefly, but there's a very strong sense of, "What next" afterwards. As with The Sixth Sense, this film ends with a starting revelation at the end, but though it makes perfect sense, again the way the revelation plays out is not satisfying. The film almost demands a sequel to work fully.

Nonetheless, it's a thought-provoking film and worth a look if any of these elements intrigue you. Fans of Dark City might also enjoy it.

We wrapped up the evening by heading to Frankie, Johnny & Luigi's for Italian food. I ate too much, and went home feeling completely stuffed again. I came home and spent the evening feeling completely zoned, and mostly just watched VH1 and MTV during the evening.

Not a bad couple of days. And the weekend's not over yet.