Fiber Fool

This week we hit our favorite independent video store in town, The Village Vidiot. There had been a couple movies both of us had been bringing up repeatedly as movies we wanted to watch and this has definitely been a movie-watching sort of week for me. Partially due to higher than standard pain levels keeping me quite tired and slightly lazy (though I’ve gone to all water aerobics classes and cleaned the fridge anyway) and partially due to the cold and snowy weather we had at the beginning of the week.

The first movie we watched was Bride and Prejudice. On the off chance that I’m not the last one to see this movie it is a retelling of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice in a small rural town in modern-day India. It was made in what I understand to be a rather accurate Bollywood style by a British film maker, Gurinder Chadha, who also brought us Bend it Like Beckham.

I’m completely in the dark when it comes to Bollywood films. I’ve never seen one I don’t think. So I’m not positive how accurate the Bollywood style was in this film. In the interviews with Chadha she did often comment about things they changed or tweaked to make it appeal to the west, though mostly I think she was commenting about the music. It was a totally campy riot of color and dancing and music. I was little put off by the over-acting that happens in most of it. That said, now that I know to expect a bit of campy flare I think this would be a movie I would watch again. It would be a perfect pick-me-up film with the great costuming, fun music, and heart warming classic tale of romance. My only complaint - there should have been an extra feature on the DVD that taught some of the basics of the great dancing!
Now, if anyone has any recommendations on Bollywood films one should see, please pass them along! Both DH and I are up for exploring that genre.

Since we were on a bit of a foreign film start with Bride & Prejudice we decided to continue along that path and we *finally* rented Kitchen Stories. We had been recommended this film close to two years ago I believe.

It is the 1950’s in Sweden and Norway. The Swedish Home Research Institute has recently completed a study of Swedish housewive’s patterns in the kitchen and manage to devise a more efficient layout and thus saving the women from walking the equivalent distance from Stockholm to the far south of Africa to instead walking only to Italy. Following this research they embark on a study of the kitchen habits of Norwegian bachelor farmers.

It sounds odd and doesn’t seem like a good film could come from such a premise. Especially when early in the movie you hear the instructions to the observers - don’t talk to your bachelor, do not in any way get involved in the daily routines of your bachelor, do not drink during your study period… But the movie is much more the story of human relationships as the observers all travel in caravan to the far north of Norway in the winter and set up their trailers where they are to live until nearly Christmas.

I don’t want to give away the plot too much. But I will highly recommend it. It is subtitled so there was no knitting going on during this one, but I think it is worth the hour and half of no knitting!

Speaking of knitting, there has been tiny progress on the second anklet as I’ve been spending a lot of time being a code monkey here on the blog and working on getting a proper gallery set up and looking similar to the blog. But, I think there will be some actual fiber/crafty content next week. I’ve also gotten my blog links moved over so just hit the “links” link at the top of the page to check it out. More links will be added over the coming days as well - KALs etc. I’ll be playing with the sidebar today too I think so thinks look wonky at any point, it’s just me rooting around in the back-end of the blog.

I’ll be back at some point over the weekend for a final Project Spectrum post for April, but until then, have a great weekend!