I had grand plans yesterday. At 4 a.m., we got our first warning shot that Steinbeck was, once again, right. Dipper decided to throw up not once, not twice, but three times. A harbinger, if I had only paid attention to the signs.
I didn’t get a lot of sleep, even though I did manage to fall back asleep around 8 or 9 for about an hour. I’d like to say that was my low point, but you never know how bad a day can get until you get there.
Some of the day went smooth, I got to see some friends that are moving away to Maine. I’m sure we will continue to cross paths, but it’s good to take advantage of time while you still can. Then I got my day started in earnest, needing to pick up medication for my mother and do some grocery shopping.
Aldi was, obviously, closed until 3 p.m. Totally normal for a grocery store in the middle of a weekday. So, I swung over to the drug store to pick up the prescription (the second time I’ve been, mind you, because the first time they only had half the pills they needed). When I got there, I was told that it wasn’t ready and to come back later. Cool.
My third stop was one of the worst Kroger stores in the country, the Lombardy location in Richmond. I’ve never had a bad experience there and I knew I could count on them. They did not let me down. I wish I could say the same for when I got back home.
Our other dog Kahlua got a taste for Pine Mountain Starter Logs and pulled one out of the box. She had destroyed it and the wrapper, leaving a trail of carnage. Now I had an armful of groceries, a living room full of starter log, no medication and movie tickets for a movie at 3:50.
I called the vet, who directed me to poison control. Between our vet conversations and internet sleuthing, we uncovered that she was most likely going to be okay. She might just be sick. Cool. After getting the house recovered and the food put away, doing a wellness check on my dog and making sure that she would be well attended, I was able to make the movie. Don’t worry, Kahlua was under the care of my wife, I’m not a total monster.
I also got to see You, Me & Her, more on that later. It is not related to the Netflix TV show, even though they have the same subject matter.
I came home from the movie to make dinner and prepare for the second half of our movie going experience, which was supposed to be One Of Them Days (an appropriate title for today), but Kahlua decided that being sick was in the cards after all and started puking, so I canceled the second movie and helped take care of our sick baby. She was, as expected, fine the rest of the evening but better safe than sorry.
I was hoping to bring you news of two films, but you’ll have to settle for one and a lot of dog puke. So much dog puke. She seems to be fine today, eating regularly and drinking normal amounts of water. Energy levels are good, so the worst of the log experience is behind us. I wish I could say this was the first time our billy goat masquerading as a dog had tried to ruin our all of our days with poor impulse control but some dogs just can’t help it. The worst part was, she did it in the few minute window of my mom going to the bathroom. Cool.
I did manage to sneak in a movie during the day, as noted earlier, and I’m glad I got that in. You, Me & Her is the story of a couple a decade into their relationship. They are both varying degrees of awful, to each other and to themselves. They are spoiled rich kids who treat each other poorly and divorce themselves of accountability.
Directed by Dan Levy Dagerman and written by Selina Ringel (who also plays Mags, the wife in the couple), this is a story that could have easily drifted into broad humor or gratuitous sex but manages to work as both a dramatic character study and a Woody Allen-esque comedy.
Mags is the daughter of a successful Mexican businessman and she works for him. Ash (Ritesh Rajan) is a stay at home dad with dreams of turning his homegrown weed into a mass market product. They are wealthy, with an au pair tending to the majority of their child rearing. He spends most of his time smoking pot and she feels the burden of making a sandwich for her child. A moment that is mocked by her father on a work call.
Ash’s father chastises him for failing to appreciate his wife. She spurns his sexual advances. They are deeply unhappy in their lives and in their marriage. What better cure than a trip to Mexico, to a resort town an hour from where Mags grew up.
On a quest to score weed in Mexico, Ash gets them entangled with a local couple who tries to entice them into swinging. The locals spend much of the time laughing at the American couple who are concerned with things that don’t matter and don’t seem to care about the things that do. After rebuking the sexual advances, the unhappy couple returns.
Mags meets Angela (Sydney Park), a digital nomad that is teaching yoga on the beach. Sparks fly and soon ideas start floating in both Ash and Mags’ minds. The three meet up for dinner that night and end up dancing into the night. Mags and Angela share a consensual kiss and a promise of a text follows. When the text doesn’t materialize, the couple returns to their home in Los Angelos.
Wouldn’t you know it? Angela is going to be in LA for a night on her way to Thailand. The movie kicks off there and the bulk of the movie is about one night in LA at their swanky estate. I appreciate that the film never paints the main characters as good or bad people, just real people dealing with the idea of adding a third.
There are some valid complaints about the development of Angela’s character. She is underdeveloped and her story is ancillary to the main characters. Others will be less forgiving of that, but I did appreciate how we got to see behind the curtain of a relationship that felt real. The actions of the characters felt natural to me and when things come to a head it isn’t in the way that I expected.
The dialog was also loaded with dry humor that won’t land with everyone, but I found amazing. I wasn’t prepared for how funny some moments were. The movie encourages us to laugh at the absurdities of Americans without shining a blinding spotlight on those flaws. Ash is repressed to an alarming degree and it hurts their sex life. Mags steamrolls Ash anytime he tries to build emotional intimacy.
By the end, I was glad I saw it and even more glad that it was made. Adult comedy has been discarded by Hollywood, by and large. Indie comedies still get made, but the cloud of Apatow still lingers heavy even there. This was a solid rom-com about terrible people learning to maybe be less terrible and to remember why they fell in love with each other in the first place.