Evan Dodds – Non-work-related blog

Jodi and I went to see this one last night, and it was pretty good. It was a bit longer than I had expected (and hopefully no spoilers here), that’s even without all of the nastiness at the end of her life included as part of the film.

Having read the Wikipedia entry about her, I felt prepared (or at least much more prepared than I would have been several weeks earlier, when I knew almost nothing of the history). I found the film to be well made and interesting. There were a couple of times where it seemed to drag a bit and spend too long on one activity, but it seemed pretty clear that these were intentional to show how utterly boring it would have been to live that “life of privilege” (more like “life of duty and expectation”).

In the film, you really could empathize with her predicament. Here she is, a young teenage girl, and all the (much, MUCH older) adults in her life keep telling her what a horrible failure she is/will-be if she can’t convince her asexual teenage husband to impregnate her. This problem she faced is a well-known secret of their marriage 200+ years later, but it was probably just awful for her to have to face this day in and day out at the time. Not to mention the way it must have felt to have many people in her court (and in the country at large) sniping at her behind her back. No wonder she escaped to her little village!

In other news, AMC Theatres are the bomb. Although they are not Landmark or IFC(see this previous blog post and this one too) and are therefore not perfect in every way, they are definitely a close runner-up. There were two key things last night that made this clear to me:

1. The theatre had about 30-40 people in it (probably not bad for a weekday evening show) but it was totally quiet apart from the movie — almost uncomfortably so during a few moments of silence as the movie was starting and I was chewing loudly! No cellphone ringing, nobody talking through the movie, nobody yelling at the screen. Awesome!
2. We hadn’t had dinner yet and were hesitant about having hotdogs, pretzels, and popcorn as our official dinner. But AMC to the rescue, they told me that I could bring in outside food and that this is their standard policy! I ran out and got a quick burger to go and brought it back into the threatre as a very satisfied customer! Bravo AMC!