Transsiberian follows Jessie ( Emily Mortimer) and Roy ( Woody Harrelson) as they return from an aid mission in China. Roy, as a huge train nerd, wants to take his wife on a bit of an adventure, so they take the Transsiberian railway from China to Moscow. They share a cabin with Carlos ( Eduardo Noriega) and Abby ( Kate Mara), a couple who appears to have some secrets. As you may guess, some bad things ensue during this week-long journey.
The previous paragraph sounds makes this film sound cookie-cutter, but I’m happy to report that every time I felt I had the movie figured out it threw me a great curve ball. There were times where I felt the pace bog down a bit, but just as I started to think about it I would get surprised by a twist. These twists didn’t feel contrived, they weren’t bricks over the head, they were subtle surprises that drew you further into the story.
The movie wasn’t perfect, but it was really good. Mortimer was clearly the star, and she delivered a fantastic performance. The supporting actors were all solid as well, although Harrelson’s character was more of a caricature, being the comic relief in a rather serious film.. Unfortunately, his levity felt shoehorned in at times… When the film ended, my first instinct was that it needed about 10 minutes trimmed, but I think this was a kneejerk reaction. In all reality, if it weren’t for the moments of feeling slightly bogged down, I don’t think the payoff of the twists would have felt as special.
After the film, the director, co-writer, and Sir Ben Kingsley himself did a very nice Q&A session, even in the face of some rather rude audience members who were talking over them and getting up and leaving en masse mid sentence. But the three of them gave pretty good, considered answers to all of the questions asked.
I woke up this morning at 6:30am, but called BS on that right away and stayed in bed until 7:30am, when I gave up trying to fall back asleep and got up. After puttering around for an hour or so I took a shower and ran out to Home Depot to finish the order for our french door. coco_b placed the order earlier in the week, but she was unsure of the jamb size, so she put it on hold until we could measure it and get back to them. While I was there I got a new shower head as well as a new motion sensor for the back stairwell. I came home, made pancakes for breakfast, and then we took a solid nap.
When I woke up from our nap, I saw our downstairs neighbor Greg in the back yard preparing to rake the lawn. We totally slacked off last fall and never bothered to clean up the yard before the first snow, so it was time to take care of it. I joined him, and it only took us a few hours to polish the whole thing off. At some point I also installed the new shower head and the motion sensor. Not to mention cooking (ok, reheating) dinner. I was pretty friggin’ productive, eh?
On an unrelated note, I received a letter in the mail from the Red Sox Ticket guy, thanking me profusely and containing a gift card to the Halfway Cafe, which is pretty awesome!
I’ve been griping about how my spices have been completely unorganized since we moved into this house almost a year ago. I finally ordered a large quantity of metal tins to solve this problem.
Taking a cue from Alton Brown and Good Eats, I purchased small 4oz. metal tins and used Velcro to fasten them to the inside of the doors to one our cabinets. Originally AB used magnets, but recently I noticed that he silently switched to Velcro. I’m guessing that the adhesive magnetic strips simply weren’t strong enough and the tins migrated down the door over time. The velcro seems to do the job nicely, and also allows me to stick non-ferrous objects (which you can see in one of the other photos in the set).
