Downhill

Friday, 21 January 2011

After waiting for several weeks, a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo finally arrived for me at the library. I picked it up a few days ago and, last night, I began reading it.

Chapter one was entirely fascinating. It briefly opened up a mystery that made me want to skip ahead to find the answer. But I stayed true to the story and forced myself to continue linearly.

I began reading chapter two last night, too, but it got boring, so I went to bed.Today, during lunch, I picked it up again and tried reading more of the chapter. It is the complete reverse of the first chapter: this time, I was paging forward not because I was excited, but because I was trying to see how long this booooring chapter was.

Basically, the story got bogged down in a courtroom tale, which is okay, but then just devolved into a story of backroom economics and international shady business dealings. ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz z z z z z z z z.

Sorry, tattooed lady, I guess I’ll just cut my loses here and return it to the library next time I go.

Saturday, 22 January 2011

The big news for me today is that I finally saw a film that I’d wanted to see for over 20 years. That film is titled Downhill (or, as it was originally titled in America, When Boys Leave Home).

You probably haven’t heard of this motion picture, and that’s okay. It wasn’t great by any means. But it had a decent story and, at less than 90 minutes, it certainly held my interest.

Downhill was directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

I was going to detail my long and varied story in trying to see every Film and TV show directed by Alfred Hitchcock but…as luck would have it…I have already told that tale IN THIS BLOG POST.

The important point is, that by 1999, I had seen all but two of Hitchcock’s films and all but one of the TV episodes. I finally watched that TV episode, and the film Waltzes from Vienna, back on March 28th of 2009. That left Downhill as the only film on my list that I hadn’t seen.

Turns out, some good chap decided to upload Downhill to YouTube a few months back and, since I periodically browse the web for this one particular movie, I finally came across it a few days ago. I saved it to my browser until I had some spare time to watch it.

I had time today.

Here it is: Downhill

Seeing everything directed by Alfred Hitchcock has long been on my short list of things I really, really, really wanted to accomplish. I seem to have been having a rash of goal-achieving lately, as only a few month back, I succeeded at achieving the goals of having more than one kid and performing a wedding ceremony.

Unlike those two long-held goals, though, this one was accomplished alone, without fanfare; just me sitting at my computer with headphones on. Kind of anti-climactic, really. When I ventured to Universal Studios to see the Hitchcock exhibit, and when I went to Oak Street Cinema to watch Dial M for Murder in its original 3D, and when I called up a video rental store in another state and asked them to ship me some Hitchcock films, and when I had about ten people over to my house to watch an old Hitchcock film that I found in a dusty bin at a hole-in-the-wall video store, I never would have guessed that it would have ended this way: me, alone, quietly watching a silent film while the rest of the world slept.

But that’s what happened.

Maybe it’s all Downhill from here.