Snow and Rain

It snowed a little and rained a lot more. The winter seems to hang around a bit longer, and I hear people complaining about it every day. Well, winter is actually my favorite season and I really don't mind the cold. I always enjoyed running through winter. Only problem during cold months was that the water fountains were closed in the parks and I had to carry a bottle of water. Otherwise, I always loved long runs in winter. Anyway, I loved the sight of snow and rain, especially after the movie we saw yesterday.

Yesterday afternoon, a perfectly grim day for such mellow activity, we went to a screening of Japanese animated film "Wolf Children" as part of New York International Children's Film Festival. From their line-up, I picked this film because it was in Japanese and not dubbed. The story seemed also interesting, something we could even relate to; it was about a young Japanese woman, a single mother, raising two wolf children. They were named Yuki(snow) and Ame(rain), and their father was a wolf man, half human, half wolf. My only concern was that it was a long movie- almost two hours long. Although Taiyo has seen two-hour movies many times, this was going to be his first long movie in a theater. But since it was Children's Film Festival, there were enough small children like Taiyo in the audience. To my surprise, many of the small people were not Japanese. Are their parents going to read the subtitle for the kids? There was a three-year old next to us who wasn't really thrilled to sit down on his seat anyway before the show. So of course this little boy was so restless and fussy throughout the movie. So compared to his poor blond fellow who didn't understand Japanese, Taiyo was fine most of the time. But on and off Taiyo started asking so many questions why was this and that and I got a bit distracted and annoyed myself that I had to try to calm him down. Sometimes he was asking me things off the movie like, "why is it so dark here?" "why does this move?" moving the armrest up and down. I was surprised that he was acting like that, because the film was simply stunning, funny and touching, romantic and tragic. You'd laugh a lot and weep plenty. The audience was good mix of families and adults, anime fans, Japanese and all others, and remarkably wide age groups. Highly recommended if you can find it. I don't think they have theatrical release scheduled at this point.

After the film, we went across the 57th street to Angelo's Pizza. At 7 o'clock, we were tired. We got there before 4, so we were at the theater for three hours. Location was the winner, and Taiyo hardly says no to pizza. In the past two years, it feels like I've eaten more pizza than the rest of my life combined. Possibly. So we got to Angelo's and obviously many people after the film headed there and it was almost full house. Locations, locations. It seemed like overpriced and mediocre kind of place and it was. But location won. We were not going to walk another block to look for a restaurant, and there aren't many on 57th street anyway. So I had a glass of wine and we had a plain pie but they didn't even bake with basil but sprinkled a few pieces after, so it was easy to pick the greens off for Taiyo and there weren't too many anyway. It was ok, not terrible, not fabulous. I wished they put a little more sauce and cheese- the edges with no sauce and cheese were too wide. Crust was pretty thin and easy to eat. Service was pretty bad. Unfriendly in general. Taiyo ate half of the pie, and stayed in his seat quietly once it arrived. His review may be more favorable to them than mine.