Today is Superbowl Sunday. I dropped the pretense that I care about it around the time I turned 18. I followed football minimally as a teenager, just enough to converse about it in the eternal effort to be like everyone else. As much as I love baseball, I am filled with a deep and abiding apathy for football. Every year we try to celebrate by doing something that is normally crowded. We're going to have dinner (or "linner", kind of like "brunch") at the Cheesecake Factory in Buckhead and then maybe a movie.

Yesterday we saw Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Yes, it's true, I have not seen The Two Towers but I have seen this. I thought it was a great movie, fantastically funny and disturbing. Sam Rockwell did a great job, and his Gong Show segments were eery. I've seen some negative reviews on this that all seem to miss a crucial point - over and over we are given to believe that this may or may not all be happening. That's what I really liked about the visual style. The way the movie looks does a lot to subvert the narrative and give it all a sense of ambiguity. There is a lot of cool stuff that is straight out of stage plays or live TV dramas of the 50's, like when walls become transparent to reveal the other end of phone conversations or when one step takes characters into another scene. There is a crucial scene at the end as Barris is really melting down and moments of the movie are replayed on the soundtrack as the corresponding settings are wheeled by as stage flats. That said to me "All of this is as real as you choose to believe it is." I found it clever and engaging filmmaking.