“The whole world was tamed by men who ate biscuits.”

The weekend of three movies…

After finally returning the Netflix I’d been carrying around in my car for nearly a month (Herb & Dorothy and the last disc of season five of Weeds), I rearranged my queue to allow for any new releases. Up next in the docket: Julie & Julia and Brothers.

The older and more crotchety I get, the less interested I am in going out on Friday nights. After a long workweek, it just seems like an expensive way to ruin an otherwise productive Saturday. A sober Friday means spinning class and errands on Saturday morning, whereas a drunken Friday means no Saturday morning at all. Just groggy stumbling and scrambled eggs that I will regret eating two minutes after the last bite.

So instead, we took the classy route – we watched a movie about the life and times of a famed gourmet chef while eating Long John Silvers’ famed gourmet fried fish parts. When all was said and done, we were both satisfied by the hush puppies, but Matt was less than pleased with the movie. I, on the other hand, was able to look past Amy Adams’ characters’ vapidity and mullet to thoroughly enjoy the “Julia” parts, the scenes in which Meryl Streep is tall and talented and Stanley Tucci is short and good natured, true to form.

Movie 2: Crazy Heart, seen Saturday afternoon. This was originally a movie I felt I needed to see for street cred. Like it would cancel out the fact that I’d paid to watch Valentine’s Day two weeks before. And when we found out it was still playing in Omaha, we knew we had to hop to it before it was too late.

I’m glad we did because it was great – great music, great performances, about a dozen great shots of Jeff Bridges’ slack, sweaty, whisky-filled stomach. In one particular scene, Bad Blake (Bridges) is making biscuits for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s young son, and he utters the quote I used as a title. So, you know, good biscuit quotes. If you have the chance to see it before it’s out of the theaters, it’s worth the $10 (and the other $10 you’ll probably spend on the soundtrack).

Movie 3: After an evening at The Brothers, drinking good cocktails and playing one particularly bad game of darts, it took everything in me to get outside in the sunlight on Sunday and hobble around pretending to exercise. So when Dana and Brandon reminded me that we’d talked about watching Mulholland Drive that afternoon, I was all in. Just like fried fish and Julia Child go together, so do beautiful Sunday afternoons and David Lynch movies.

I have less to say about this one. It was baffling, as expected. After falling asleep thinking about the various plot points: dwarfs, decomposing bodies, the creepy synthesized score, Justin Theroux, cowboys and the logistics of fitting all things disturbing into one film, I gave in and sought the help of experts this morning. I’m not sure whether the various online analyses confirmed my theory, or whether my theory came out of smarter people’s analyses. Either way, no hay banda!

Silencio.