Notes on Old Movie Week

This past week was sort of Old Movie Week at my house. Last Sunday was India Night. I had friends over for take-out Indian food (from the open-under-new-management Tandoor India restaurant on W. Market St) and a showing of Slumdog Millionaire on Netflix DVD. Though a big fan of Indian cuisine, I hadn't been to Tandoor in several years, when it was Nikita. The food was excellent--as good or better than Saffron. We ordered a variety of entrees and shared, buffet style. I particularly liked the chicken shahi korma (made with boneless dark-meat chicken) and the wonderfully garlicky Garlic Nan.

I would not put Slumdog Millionaire at the top of my favorite movies list, but I can see why it has gotten so much critical acclaim. I'm glad we saw it on DVD, though. After watching the first few minutes and understanding little of the dialogue, we turned the English sub-titles on on the DVD and could easily understand the rest of the movie. Without sub-titles, I think we would have been lost for the rest of the show.

This is the second time sub-titles has saved a movie for me. I watched the BBC version of State of Play on DVD several weeks ago, and though it was supposedly in English, I had great difficulty understanding the accents. The English sub-titles on the DVD saved the day. As best I can determine, Netflix doesn't support sub-titles on watch-it-now movies. This could be a problem for some even "English language" movies.

I had missed the new True Grit movie the first time around. (I had even missed the old John Wayne version of many years ago.) Friday night I went with some friends to see it at the Sedgefield Crossings $1 theater. I enjoyed the show but was particularly surprised with the experience. The ambiance was nice though certainly not luxurious. There were more folks in the theater than had been in last half-dozen movies I have seen total. I think this isn't so much a theater as it's a popcorn stand with cheap movies attached. I enjoyed the experience and recommend it for movies you may have missed in their expensive showings the first time around.

Firefox 4 Upgrade Problem

Following the advice of my tech guru at the Wall Street Journal, I upgraded my Firefox browser the the latest version 4 this morning. Unfortunately that created an unforeseen problem: FF4 doesn't work with my password manager, Roboform (ver. 6). I'd have to upgrade to a new version of Roboform (at $10 or $30 or something--no thanks) So I had to uninstall FF4, find FF 3.6 on the web, download and install it. I couldn't find a downloaded version of FF3.6 on my computer. So this was a reminder to always SAVE a downloaded program rather than just INSTALL it, so I can easily re-install in the future if necessary.

Prior to uninstalling FF4 I tried to use Windows Restore function to take my computer back to before the FF4 install. The most recent restore point I had was a week or so ago (I know, I should have established a Restore Point before installing FF4). Restore was unable to do the restore function, so I was left with plan B. As Roseanne Roseannadanna said, "It's always something."