Alert the media...

Rick and I watched the movie “Kung Fu Hustle” on DVD over the weekend. I was surprised by how much I liked this movie, especially since it was barely in the theaters for very long, and the previews I’d seen hadn’t made much sense. But it ended up being a really funny, imaginative movie, with some unique characters and nice special effects. The dialogue is Chinese, and Rick and I had a disagreement over whether or not to watch the movie with subtitles, or dubbed into English. Personally, I don’t like watching a dubbed movie – I’d much rather listen to the dialogue in the original language of the film, and simply read the subtitles. Dubbed movies always look so strange – the words don’t match up with the mouths, and half the time, the voices sound foreign to the people they’re supposed to represent. Which would make sense, because they ARE foreign. I also have a habit of turning up the volume on subtitled movies if I can’t hear the voices clearly enough – which is strange, because I don’t need to hear anything to read the subtitles, and it’s not like I’ll understand any of the words if the volume is higher. I guess I just like to hear other languages because I find them quite fascinating. Anyway, we DID end up watching the Chinese version with English subtitles…

We watched it in our home theater, which, in our present house, is just a big room with all of Rick’s various electronic equipment and the movie screen. The walls are a boring beige, and there are three big windows along one side, so during the daytime the room is flooded with light. We really don’t watch many movies during the daytime anyway, but if we wanted to, we’d have to find a way to blackout those windows.

But when we lived in New Jersey, it was a different story. The house we bought in New Jersey is still my favorite house of all the places I’ve lived, because it was unique – it wasn’t simply a cookie-cutter house in the middle of a subdivision. What’s more, the entire house had been recently renovated when we bought it – so although the house itself was built in the 60’s, everything inside was brand-new. The carpet, the tile, the appliances, the bathroom fixtures – everything was shiny and clean and gleaming and up-to-date.

Everything, that is, except the basement. The basement HADN’T been renovated, save for a new oil heating tank and air conditioning unit. The basement itself was dark, damp, full of cobwebs and extremely uninviting. There was really no reason anyone would ever venture down there. And Rick decided we should change that. He decided to keep going with the “renovating” theme and have part of the basement transformed into a media room. At first, I was rather unenthusiastic about this idea. It’s not like we NEEDED a media room, and couldn’t the money be spent on something more practical? Even as we found a contractor and the room progressed, I was skeptical. Soon, the room began to take shape, and the dank, scary basement became more and more interesting. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t such a horrible idea… as the days progressed, and the media room emerged from the subterranean concrete, I began forming ideas for color schemes. Rick placed the entire “decorating” burden on me, something I was happy to mull around in my head. I finally decided on dark blue walls, a very light lilac for the ceiling, and a dark fuchsia for the trim around the rope lighting. And, the piece de resistance – purple carpet.

So our basement went from looking something like this:

To this:

Sadly, even a super-cool media room such as the one we’d managed to create was not enough incentive to keep Rick in New Jersey. We moved back to Texas after barely breaking in our creatively-decorated media room, and now we watch movies in our plain beige room. And I suppose it doesn’t matter, since the MOVIE is the main attraction, and you can’t really see the walls and carpet in the dark anyway. But perhaps it’s sort of like those foreign language movies – just because I can’t understand the language doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear it. And just because I can’t always see everything in my media room doesn’t mean I don’t want it to be visually appealing.

Perhaps next weekend I’ll have to pick up a few gallons of paint. And some purple carpet. Definitely purple carpet…