Tweekly make: For the #instacookingclub, we made Shaved Asparagus Pizza from Smitten Kitchen. It was SUPER duper delicious, but shaving asparagus is time consuming and seems kind of silly maybe. I think it ended up being worth it.

Dinner @ Takito with Stacy & Amanda. Stayed home sick Wednesday and Thursday with what I hope was just a cold. Watched lots of Glee when I wasn’t sleeping. Was too sick for spin Wednesday. Annie & Jason’s shower in Naperville was lovely. Those kiddos are beloved by so many and it was lovely to share the day with them. Dinner with Z, Paige, Dave, & William at Briciola. I was better for spin Sunday, but boy was it hard after only missing one class. Lunch with Z at Delish.

Films watched 15th week of the year:

Room 237 *
Live Free or Die Hard
The Hunger Games
Gayby
Upstream Color
Primer
The Campaign
Dream Home ** [ Hong Kong ]

* documentary
** foreign language

Upstream Color was this week’s winner by a long shot. I was very excited to see it after Z told me about it and I watched the preview and ended up crying! It is beautiful, intense, and mysterious. The score was perfect. Shane Carruth is the swiss army knife of filmmakers. He wrote, directed, starred in and scored Upstream Color. It is a puzzle of a movie and not one that you have to want to solve, but that is part of the fun. We are only in April, but this will go down as one of my favorites from this year. I predict it will be one I will watch again and again. Very important additional fact: there are adorable baby pigs, but one very troubling scene involving a pig where I was grasping Z’s hand super hard.

Room 237 was one of the worst documentaries I have ever seen. There were a few conspiracy theories in the film about The Shining that perhaps seemed plausible, but the way it was strung together was clunky and I hated all the footage used from totally unrelated films to push the film forward. Two men in the row Z and I were sitting up got up and left 20 minutes before the end and I feel like I should have joined them.

Dream Home was the most violent film I’ve watched in recent memory. Wow, so much blood. The ending was a copout, where I was left wondering why. Not a waste of time though.

Gayby was very enjoyable to watch and not about a gay baby. I am noting that here because two people asked me that when I said I had watched it. It is about longtime best friends [straight woman / gay man ] who are both single and decide to have a baby together. I remember seeing this as a project on Kickstarter and now I wish I had backed it. It was VERY fun and the soundtrack was great. I don’t believe I’ve talked about it on the La De Blog, but I watch more gay movies than most of my gay friends and a lot of these movies are really bad. It is great that this is finally changing. About time!