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I spent most of the weekend catching up on housekeeping. I spent Saturday morning running errands, then nearly two solid hours just cleaning up my apartment. Folding laundry, dishes, stowing gear, etc. I have "before" pics. They are ugly.

Saturday night was a fiasco that, thankfully, ended well. The plan was to meet friends for dinner, then head down to the Forum to see Nine Inch Nails in concert. Unfortunately, I realized after dinner (and 45 min before showtime) that I'd left my tickets at home. Doh! So my girl and I booked it back to Simi and down to the venue in record time, arriving at our seats during NIN's first number.

Unfortunately, our seats were pretty iffy. I've heard that the Forum isn't the greatest venue, and now I see the complaint. There really isn't a way to get good seats close to the stage. It's either festival seating among the sweaty, shoving masses, or reserved seats far from the stage. The music was unreal, but a lot of the theatrics were kind of lost to us.

I watched Redbelt Sunday night while folding laundry. Redbelt has all the classic Mamet dialog and con games plus Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, so it should be awesome, right? I dunno. I was annoyed I'd stayed up late to finish it.

"You stole my idea!"

"How 'bout that."

For me, Redbelt had all the right ingredients, but didn't play enough to Mamet's strengths: intrigue, convolution, layering, ensemble casting.

For me, Ricky Jay is half the reason to watch a Mamet film, and he's totally wasted in Redbelt. Rebecca Pidgeon is a radically underrated actress, and shows it in this movie. She's so breezy and natural that she becomes nearly invisible playing behind the foreground of stylized storytelling.

Chiwetel Ejiofor nearly salvages the movie, but the ending was too conventional and predictable to make Redbelt satisfying the way that, say, Heist was.