My movie marathon continues, and the sweater I began in 2005 is nearly complete — to be fair, I’ve put it down for months at a time, and then pulled out whole sections, but it’s the first one I’ve ever knit. Of course, the proof will be when I put all the pieces together — will it be worth wearing or will it be a Frankenstein’s monster of a sweater? We’ll know soon …

So, as the award season bears down upon us, here’s a roundup of what I’ve been watching this week:

The Lives of Others: Like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, this is one of those movies that I thought I wouldn’t like. In fact, I’ve sent it back to Netflix 3 times after having not been able to get past the opening interrogation scene. I can’t do movies about totalitarianism — they give me nightmares. But I kept reading such terrific things about this movie that finally, this weekend, I stuck it out — It’s marvelous. All the accolades are completely justified — the performances are wonderful and I truly didn’t see where the plot was going. I may very well watch it again tonight now that I know what’s going to happen so I can see how it unfolds. The surprise is that the movie turns out to be about goodness — about the cost of doing the right thing, the cost of trying as hard as one can in impossible circumstances to do the right thing. That the characters are attempting this while buried up to their necks in an evil that they don’t realize is nearly obsolete is all the more heartbreaking.

Margot at the Wedding: Another one I might not have watched had I not had a screener sitting here — Noah Brumbach’s world of lost children and their lost parents in the 70′s always hits a little too close to home for me — but that’s part of the appeal as well. That nearly-forgotten world of self-actualization and bad hair. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black are wonderful as the odd couple with the most genuine connection in the whole movie — another suprise, a movie I liked much more than I thought I would.

Into the Wild: Unwatchable. I got about an hour into this 2.5 hour movie and was so bored I turned it off. If I had to see that character blather on about “the wild” one more time with blissy romantic stars in his eyes I was going to throw up (and this is from a person who fought for the academic legitimacy of wildness and nature during all 5 years of my Phd work). This is the worst sort of Romanticism — it has none of the astringent inquisitiveness that made Krakauer’s book so interesting. Krakauer is someone who has real wilderness skills, and a has been a part of the climbing/outdoors community long enough to see how many starry-eyed untrained goofballs like McCandless are pulled out of rivers and peeled off cliff faces every year because they mistook romantic enthusiasm for skill and preparation. But Sean Penn seems to have cast all that by the wayside in this film.(And the paddling scene really pissed me off — that the PR people are claiming that Emile Hirsh paddled those rapids himself, with no training is absurd — anyone who knows the least bit about whitewater boating can see that a) an untrained boater would have eaten it at the first wave and b) the person in that boat has real skills and knows what he’s doing. I can see a long summer ahead for my search and rescue friends.) At any rate, while I liked the ancillary performances — Catherine Keener is terrific, as is Vince Vaughn as the combine operator (he should play more working guys — he’s got the physique and he’s really good in that milieu). At any rate, I was curious about his one because the book was a sort of seminal text in my academic work and one I would have loved to have taught (the book is much better on how McCandless was influenced/seduced by a particular strain of American literature, with a lot of Tolstoy thrown in for good measure). But I found the movie unwatchable.

Gone Baby Gone: Another terrific surprise — Ben Affleck directs and absolutely nails that strange Boston underbelly. Casey Affleck, who was the bright spot in Jesse James runs away with this movie — he plays that rarity in American popular culture these days, a man. He’s boyish in appearance, but this movie is, like The Lives of Others, deeply concerned with morality — what is right? what is the greater good? how does one live as a good man in a corrupt and evil world? Amy Ryan is also really great as the drug-addict mother of the missing child — it’s a performance in which she never panders to the audience, never tries to redeem her character. Another surprise of a movie —

There’s this week’s movie roundup — there might be nothing on TV thanks to the writers strike, but it’s a really strong year for movies …

Look at Valentine the pig — it’s not photoshopped, there was this story in the Daily Mail earlier in the week about this adorable Glouchestershire Old Spot pig who came out covered in hearts.

The farmer who bred here has been breeding Old Spots for 25 years, and is pleased to see that the breed’s come back from near-extinction.

My own pig project is on hold for the moment. All my partners in pig raising/curing are tied up with other projects, as am I, and so for now I’ll just have to settle for whatever non-CAFO pork I can manage to find.

So Happy Valentines Day from Valentine the pig …

Here’s the poor post-op dog. There are so many staples in that leg that it looks like he’s got a zipper — he’s not really putting weight on it yet although he’s toe-touching a lot. He also seems to think that when in motion, it’s important to go everywhere as fast as he can on his three legs — I think he’s trying to outrun the leg that hurts — but it keeps following him around. He’s in pretty good spirits — bored, and occasionally making a run for it, or doing something he shouldn’t like jumping on the couch (he’s allowed on the couch, it’s just the jumping on and off while on the injured list that has me worried).

There are two kinds of canine ACL surgery — we went for the less-invasive one where they drill a hole through his lower leg bones, and string a suture through it, then wrap it around the back of the joint to stabilize it. There’s another more radical surgery where they actually cut off the lower leg bones, change the angle of the knee joint, and bolt it all back together — but that seemed a little severe, and since he’s not a big dog, we went for the less-invasive option. The good news was that the ligament hadn’t been entirely blown, so the recovery should be easier that it would be otherwise.

Right now he’s in his crate in my office, a crate he likes much better today than yesterday, because I folded up a big poofy old comforter and so now it’s very cozy in there. There’s a lot of sleeping going on around the casa, and his incision is looking better every day. Poor bunny. Here’s hoping he’ll be able to run and chase things through the woods again this summer like his old self.