Eastern Promises

So I pretty much worked all weekend at Aritzia while my boyfriend was up visiting. I'm a little ashamed to say this but...I'm exhausted! Who knew working in retail was such strenuous work? And to think that I was going to get a job as a day labourer doing lawn care and pesticide work. Imagine me schlepping around a bag of fertilizer under the sun! Ha! That's a funnier image than me actually working.

I forgot what it was like to rest, and not just be a bum for the luxury of indolence, but rest as a way to recover from actual destruction to your body. For the past few months, every day has been a holiday so my body was in pretty bad shape and it badly needed to be oiled. Work is pretty much spent entirely on your feet and running around a store carrying light and heavy items. I know that after a couple of weeks, it won't tire me out and my legs will get used to it but as of now, I'm still getting into the groove of things and my legs are still raw and achy, it's as if I've just run a half-marathon (because who are we kidding? I could never run a full marathon). So my Monday consisted of pure rest: caught up on sleep, kept movement to a minimum, and now I'm going to take a much-needed bubble bath.

I also watched David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises before my afternoon nap.

Photo courtesy of 300mb moviz

My boyfriend hates this movie and really expressed that to me before I watched it. Perhaps it influenced me to be contrarian and to like it but I was very impressed with the mood and tone of the film. I like movies that don't force things down your throat (for instance, movies that have obvious heroes and villains and establish from the get-go for whom you're supposed to be rooting). Now there are some obvious villains in here but that's more of collateral for Cronenberg's attempt at trying to portray the real and often brutal vicissitudes of a Russian mob family. There's a lot of violence, a little bit of sex, and a superb fight scene featuring the nude and heavily tattooed Viggo Mortensen in a bath house.

Photo courtesy of out of the bag

And Viggo is seriously hot in it, especially with all his prison tattoos. What a superb performance. My major gripe with the film (and these types of films in general) is that I can't stand when people whose first or main language isn't English, they speak English to one another. Although there are lots of moments when the characters speak Russian sans subtitles to one another, the primary spoken language is Russian-accented English. I feel that when films do this, it makes everything a little bit more artificial. That's one of the reasons why I like Tarantino so much, because he respects the non-English language and doesn't try to manipulate it into something it isn't. The reality is that most diasporic cultures do not speak English to each other.

This has made me want to watch Lord of the Rings trilogy (uncut version) again. It was Viggo as Aragorn that made me fall in love with him as an actor in the first place.

J