Recommendations for the Day of the Golden Globes

Will you be watching the Golden Globes get awarded or not awarded tonight?  I will not be--I'm rarely an awards show kind of person:  too many commercials, too many similar speeches, too much pop culture that only marginally interest me.

I predict that Argo will win big--but that's mainly because I've seen so few of last year's movies.  Argo is a delight in so many ways and so well-done.  It manages to be a nail-biter, even when we know the ending.

I thought of the movie again when I read this story in The Washington Post.  By now, we know that Tony Mendez, the main character in Argo, was a spy.  But how many of us know that he was also a painter?

I love the story because it reminds me of how many people have a day job to go along with their creative work--and the story stresses that the two can feed each other.  It doesn't have to be a zero sum game:  "Art was often Mendez’s cover story, and in the annals of quirky covers, his was novel in that it was both a deception and a reality. He set up a studio wherever he traveled, painting when he had time, often capturing scenes he saw on his missions."

The piece also talks about Mendez's wife and son, who are also artists who share work space and gallery space.  How neat to read about families that get along and seem to really like each other.

But maybe you need something lighter to watch today.  Yesterday, in preparation for my spouse's Wednesday surgery, we went to the library to load up on DVDs.  One of the benefits that comes from not making it to movie theatres very often is that there's almost always something we want to see which we can check out for free from the library:  10 DVDs per card that we can keep for a week.

Last night we watched Baby Mama.  I'm not sure why I was resistant to watching it when it first came out in 2008.  But in the intervening years, I've really come to appreciate the work of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler; Parks and Rec is one of my absolute favorite shows, and I've loved 30 Rock in similar ways.

Baby Mama had lots of laugh out loud moments for me, which I find rare in movie comedies.  In fact, most movie comedies (as opposed to say, TV comedies) bore me.  I worried that the Amy Poehler character might be tough to take, but that was not the case.  As long as I didn't expect the movie to be a realistic analysis of work and class and the lives of women, it was great.  And I suspec that if I trained my feminist scholarly skills on the movie, I could argue that it deftly skewers sexist assumptions. 

But not this morning.  This morning, I'm just going to enjoy the laughs the movie brought me.