I Buy Groceries With the Missus I Run Eight Miles and I am Happily Baffled by Under the Skin -- A Saturday in the Life

This morning started like most others in that I woke up. Always a good first step. Went to the grocery store with the missus which I somehow always really enjoy unless the aisles are overrun by voracious college students buying up everything in sight. But it was early enough to beat the crowds. Indeed early enough to give the crowds a good thrashing. No screaming toddlers either. No bumping carts with people on cell phones we were just filling up our basket. Lovely.

It is a satisfying feeling to come home with bags of groceries and fill up the fridge and cupboards with sustenance to last the week or more. It must be a primal instinct to store food and doing so must release endorphins of some kind.

With the food put away I preceded to take some back out for purposes of filling my belly. This was especially important as I had a trip to the gym planned and never dream of going without having eaten first. Actually maybe I have dreamed of working out on an empty stomach but it would have been in the form of an involuntary nightmare -- not that there are ever voluntary nightmares mind you.

Youngest daughter is in town for the weekend having made the hour train trip from university to hang out here and enjoy her mom's cooking and -- I like to think -- her dad's company. She could do worse.

By late morning I was off to the gym where I ran on the treadmill for eight miles which took me a scant one hour one minute and 23 seconds. My best time since I was a young whipper snapper (and dinosaurs roamed the Earth). Upon completing the run I felt as though I could run another eight miles or at least one or two. But I really couldn't afford the time. Maybe in a week or so I'll go for nine.

After a hot sauna and a cold shower I enjoyed a pleasant stroll home. The walk provided a post run cool down and more time for contemplation retrospection rumination and out and out fantasy not to mention wool gathering. Back in the abode I made one of my patented fruit smoothies then sipped -- okay slurped -- away while catching up on world events via the magic of the internet. Then I was off again to the movie theater and a look at Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin.

In her previous film Scarlett Johansson mesmerized without being seen in Her. In Under the Skin she mesmerizes with nary a word uttered. She is -- suffice to say -- an amazing actress. As for the film itself...

I'm always amazed how sometimes the second a film ends when the credits have just started you can sometimes hear someone turn to the person they're with and ask: so what'd ya think? When the missus and I see a film together we usually wait at least until we've left the theater before discussing it. In the case of some films it can be a few hours. I could wait days and still not be ready to talk about Under the Skin. Yet here I am trying to write about it.

You don't see it looking at your screen but there's been a rather long pause since I wrote that last paragraph and another will likely follow the completion of this sentence....And there was......I suppose the best reason for the film's title is that it gets under the skin of the audience and into the brains. It wraps itself around the cranium attaching itself, waiting patiently living off brain cells.

It's worth it.

Under the Skin has been classified as a sci fi film. Well maybe. It's also been called -- by critics that is -- artsy erotic a thriller and impenetrable and undecipherable. I do not feel compelled to penetrate or least of all to decipher a film. Movies are not codes to be broken. There is something elemental about being told a story and if the telling is particularly good I don't really need to solve its deeper meaning. Some films are obviously allegorical and bully for them. Others are subject to interpretation and vive la difference. But very few are like Under the Skin which has few things obvious about but a lot that is strange unusual wonderfully different and baffling. Baffle me I'm yours.

Johansson plays uh, er, um. Funny thing none of the characters has a name. Least none we know of. Anyway she plays an alien life form that takes the form of a beautiful woman who travels around Edinburgh, Scotland and its environs luring random young men into her van then to a house where....Let's just say they meet a fate that is undecipherable and impenetrable. Then again so does our main character who by the way is in cahoots with a guy riding a motorcycle hither and yon and he's presumably an alien and later it seems he's got some underlings.

Never mind the damn plot points anyway. Under the Skin works so wonderfully -- well for some people like me -- because it is subject to such varying possible interpretations as I noted when perusing reviews (most quite favorable) after getting home. It therefore demands something of it audience members and that's one of the things I love in a movie and I can say that I honestly loved this movie.

Director Jonathan Glazer just did his darndest to create an interesting story told in a fascinating way and trusted viewers to make intelligent decisions about what they had seen -- or experienced. For one I appreciate it.

So this has been a damn good day and as I write these words it's still got another four hours to it. Cool.