vip in the city

Home box office

I had a full first weekend of 2008 planned — CS’s birthday dinner, FH’s “Wii, Wine and Wiener” party — but all was waylaid by a very inconveniently timed stomach virus that hit fast and hard at the end of the work week. Is there any other kind, really? At first I had chalked up the growing aches and weariness to too much coffee and late nights at the office, but by Friday afternoon, I knew I was not going to make it through the day at work. I took my leave, and descended into the subway, hoping very hard that I would not become just another sick passenger.

Somehow I made it back to my apartment without transit delay-causing incident, and there I remained for the next 48 hours.

The one good bit of timing was that my home confinement fell just days into the free month of HBO I argued out of Time Warner after my service went out for two days last week. I ended up re-watching, at least in part, a few films I’d seen (and liked) in the past, including Little Miss Sunshine and Children of Men. One I hadn’t seen before: A Good Year, the rather bad and embarrassingly clichéd movie about a ruthless bond trader (played by flash-tempered Russell Crowe) rediscovering la joie de vivre in a Provençal vineyard. Marion Cotillard as his local love interest is all but unrecognizable from her star turn in La Vie En Rose. But on mute (and on meds), the film plays like a beautifully shot travelogue. Ah, I will get back to southern France one of these days.

I was excited to come across Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which was one of the most trippy, moving films I’ve seen in theaters in recent years. The vision of Joe (Jim Carrey, whom I generally dislike) standing in the living room of an abandoned Montauk beach house, reliving his first (and soon to be vanquished) memory of his lover, Clementine (Kate Winslet), as the walls crumble around him into the Atlantic Ocean — just devastating.

In a funny bit of synergy, I noticed that Saturday’s word of the day on Dictionary.com was “lacuna” — the name of the fictitious company whose memory-erasing services are the focus of the film’s action.

lacuna \luh-KYOO-nuh\, noun;
plural lacunae \luh-KYOO-nee\ or lacunas::
1. A blank space; a missing part; a gap.
2. (Biology) A small opening, depression, or cavity in an anatomical structure.

By the time I finally emerged from my apartment on Three Kings’ Day, it was as if I had stepped into another season. Gone was the icy chill of just a few days ago; in its place: sunshine and temperatures in the 50s. And in January!

The shoppers at the I.S. 44 flea market on Columbus and 77th Street seemed to take it all in stride.

Tags: films, flea market, HBO, sick