the fat bitch day

Anne and I had what we call a "fat bitch day" on Saturday: we spent the entire day on the couch, watching movies in our pajamas.

It's weird to do that, because we are both crazy freaks about constantly working to either clean up the house, or take care of bills, or handle whatever domestic task is staring us in the face, but it rained all day, and we're having drywall hung in our house, so everything is in chaos already, making the investment:return ratio overwhelmingly in favor of "move some movies through the Netflix queue and shower if it's convenient."

We started with Fargo, which is just as good as I remember it, though I'm surprised that Steve Buscemi never really got the same level of accolade that Frances McDormand and William H. Macy got for their performances. I can't think of another actor -- John Turturo, maybe -- who could have played that role as pitch-perfect as he did. The movie reaffirmed my love for all things Coen Brothers.

Next up was Network, which has been on my list of "really need to see it" for years, and represented a serious and embarrassing gap in Great 70s Films Wil Has Seen¹ . I'd caught bits of it on cable, but never saw it from beginning to end.

Wow. It's supposed to be a satire, but it's more like a scary prediction of the future. It's almost like a group of people watched it, and instead of heeding its warnings about the future of television news, used it as a handbook to create the cable news channels.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but there's a monologue in there which blew my fucking mind, especially considering that it was written in 1976; and no, it's not one of the insanely-brilliant Howard Beale rants, either.

I'd never thought of Faye Dunaway as particularly sexy before this (my only real exposure being Chinatown and Mommie Dearest) but she's really got something working in this picture, and William Holden, who I already admired from Sunset Boulevard, is just outstanding. In fact, I don't think there's a single performance that isn't absolutely perfect in the entire movie.

I enthusiastically recommend them all, but if you have to pick one, pick Network; it's just fantastic.

So after the movies, we took a nap (yeah. awesome) then picked up bachelor chow, and spent the rest of the evening playing Sorry.

I don't know what it is about Sorry, but we play that damn game at least twice a week, and though the whole point is that it's very simple and leaves more up to chance than just about any other game we play, we take it very seriously. We play best two out of three, and the winner gets to claim the title of Undisputed Master of Sorry until the next time we play. Anne's held the title all but twice since I gave her the game for Christmas, but it is currently in my possession, after I drew a miracle 3 when we both needed it to win the tie breaking game.

When the day finally came to an end (falling asleep to Futurama in our bed with the electric blanket cranked up) she said, "You know, I feel like I should feel guilty that we totally blew off the day today, but I don't."

"That's good," I said, "because if we can't take a fat bitch day once or twice a year, why do we even get out of bed at all?"

Yes, this is what we have come to: measuring the quality of our lives by the number of fat bitch days we can have in a year.

So far, 2007 is looking pretty good.


¹This list is so long, it's on the Big List of Things Wil Is So Embarrassed About, He Will Die to Prevent its Revelation