Clockwise from top left, we have cinnamon swirl loaves (I couldn't leave well enough alone and sprinkled some cinnamon-sugar on the top of the loaves, which gave them a nice sugary, crunch crust), snickerdoodles, iced gingerbread cookies, chocolate quakes, shortbread jam cookies, and peanut butter chocolate chip cookies that have defied gravity (forgive the laziness of the photographer). Wish I had my act together enough so I could have made these all in time to mail out. Instead, they're being dispensed locally. But I was thinking of you all when I baked them, does that count?
Slumdog Millionaire finally opened in my neck of suburban wasteland, so I got to check it out. It's the first time in a while that the cinematography of a movie swept me up such that I had no idea of how paper thin the plot was. The thing is, I don't hold that against Danny Boyle. I do hold against him that he chose a Brit to play the lead male role- Dev Patel may have physically fit the role, but he did not even seem to make an attempt to speak with a proper accent. I have lots of quibbles about the movie. Why were the characters speaking almost exclusively in English? If you were considered part of a group called the Three Musketeers, wouldn't you maybe make an effort to determine what the names of said musketeers are? If you just won a major sum of money, could you really sit in a train station in solitude without a mob of Mumbai-ites close behind?
But see, it's not that kind of movie. It's not the sort of movie to take that seriously. Danny Boyle had to walk a tightrope to make it, and I can appreciate that. For once, the use of Paper Planes did not make me want to scratch someone in the face (Entourage, I'm looking at you). And I have no idea why, but every time Anil Kapoor speaks in English, I get a major case of the giggles. I can sort of see the comparisons to Little Miss Sunshine now, because they're both ultimately frothy movies. The only thing is that Boyle set his frothy tale in someplace gritty, someplace where reality is mind-boggling, and that gives it a little more weight. But only a little.
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