After we managed to get the kids safely in bed last night, we watched Chariots of Fire, which I had recorded on Tivo earlier in the evening. Marna had never seen it before, and I remember only vaguely seeing it in Pasadena when it came out, in 1981.
The Vangelis score, so widely praised at the time, seemed kind of jarring, hearing it now. I kept having to fiddle around with the remote control to get it right. The Vangelis music would cut in at a high volume, I'd amp it down, then the dialogue would start and I'd have to turn it back up again to hear the actors. One of the things you need to be careful about with a home theater system is the big sweeping soundtrack. With some of these epic movies it can be a problem. We closed the living room pocket doors so as not to wake up the kids - we sure didn't want Kieran toddling downstairs, not after a fairly exhausting weekend of following him around, dealing with his tantrums and cleaning up his messes.
Ben Cross, who plays the self-confident, chip-on-his-shoulder sprinter Harold Abrahams in the film, is quite good (whatever happened to him, I wonder), but the movie as a whole seemed a little slow and soulless and you feel that it may have been overrated at the time it came out. I hadn't realized that one of my very favorite actors, Ian Holm, plays Abrahams' coach, Sam Mussabini. As always, he is excellent. John Gielgud is appropriately creepy as the anti-Semitic master of Trinity College at Cambridge (Abrahams, as you may remember, was Jewish).
Lots to do this week, as I'm back at work. Ugh.
5:02:05 PM 
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