Message 494

Yesterday I met Jim at Starbucks. Helen is in Seattle to see her granddaughter, Emily. At noon I went to Los Gatos to watch Caroline in her soccer game. Her team won 2-1. In the afternoon I read some more of The Economist. In the evening, I watched the Sharks beat the Ducks, the team that knocked them out of the playoffs last year. After disgracing themselves in their first game, they looked really good last night. When the game was over, I watched a DVD of the movie The Secret Life of Words. It was an unusual movie. It was very slow-paced and understated. Most of the scenes were filmed on an oil platform in the North Sea, where the workers are a bunch of misfits and loners, which was very realistic for that kind of job, in my experience. The only cast member I recognized was Tim Robbins. The plot unfolds very slowly, and only with the last scene do all the plot threads get brought together. It eventually gets to be a very powerful and moving film. I give it four stars.