Read it and Weep

The last couple of weeks, I've had kind of a strange work schedule. Because the Georgia High School baseball playoff games have been smack-dab in the middle of the week, I've taken Tuesday and Friday nights off. So, on the downside I never get a "weekend," but on the up-side, I have a very short work week. I work three days, get a day off, work two more days, get another day off.

Last night (on one of my days off), Cory and I were happy to see that "Mystic River" had come back to the dollar theater. It had been playing there a few weeks ago, then left. The funny thing, though, was that it was the Open Caption version of the film.

I've seen plenty of subtitled films, but they've always been foreign films. It's not so distracting when you need to read the subtitles to understand the film. The open captioning last night kept throwing me for a loop. Sometimes the captioning wouldn't be exactly what the characters were saying. It made me wonder if the actors were ad-libbing the lines or if the caption typists just cut out extraneous and repetitive words because they felt kind of lazy. And then, while my mind was wandering off on the tangent, I would stop paying attention to the movie.

Still, it was pretty damn good. I totally see why Sean Penn won the Oscar. He managed to pull off sleazy and sympathetic all at the same time.