in which the preserved hand of a murderer, taken as the lucky charm of the ship, is eaten by a dog, and the surgeon operates and removes and reassembles the bones. And a lion hunting expedition with the Dey. And how I can use “dey” in scrabble. Only one and 1/2 more to go…

I have tried a pennywort shake, and now today a pennywort soda. They both taste terrible, like pond scum mixed with fetid grass clippings.

Just not as good as some others.

This was entertaining. I’ll see anything with Russell Crowe. Clearly his contract for this film stipulated he exploit his highly expressive stare and eyebrow movements as much as possible. Crowe did a nice job of restraint though, just enough to give Christian Bale’s character the gravity it needed. Ben Foster also made for a pretty good maniacal villain, in a very smart coat. It has been a long time since I saw the original, but this made me want to dig it up for comparison.

Park Won Sook is all kinds of wonderful as the evil mother in law.

This is an anthology of shorts by different directors, each taking one of the arrondissements as its subject. These kind of things are always a mish mash, but there was just enough delicately good stuff here to sustain it as a whole… ok, except for maybe the vampire bit, which made me want to turn the screener off right in the middle. 14e arrondissement directed by Alexander Payne was really strong, and I always love anything by Olivier Assayas, so Quartier des Enfants Rouges did not dissapoint me. But Tom Tykwer’s Faubourg Saint-Denis was a knock-out. I want to watch that about 10 more times.

Ahhh, Romain Duris. Some wonderful moments in this film. If not overall great, worth watching for Duris and those moments.

I really enjoyed this. The film boiled everything down to just the raw confusion of “information” and “assets” moving through time and space. But there was shockingly little time, and space was flattened to an incomprehensible, single plane. There was one moment where Bourne appears in New York seemingly five minutes after leaving Algeria where I got irritated and thought “gosh, did they screw something up in continuity?” and then decided that no, impossible movements are the stuff of this film. Just like the logistics of the violence and chases, so difficult to follow yet more affecting than the hyper-violence of films from the nineties. I decided that this wasn’t just insane handheld camerawork (again I got irritated at one point where the camera work was so shaky I felt sick and thought for a moment that this was just sloppy) and ridiculously hyper editing such as are in fashion these days. Instead, it seems something more interesting is going on, and I think a lot of reviewers have picked up on it, even if it isn’t really so innovative as some seem to say. Perhaps just more noteworthy in a summer blockbuster where nobody was expecting much. In the chases there was very little sense of paths followed, no real pursuers or pursued, just a mayhem of preternatural acuity and movement propelling each individual toward annihilation. There’s really no plot here, instead the film transmits a fairly direct message about the desecration of individual humanity.

Oh my, the series is nearly done airing on WYBE in Philadelphia. I will miss this show so much when it is done! I’m still pondering why I love it so much. Though essentially a soap opera, there is a lot of tenderness in the portrayal of these families. I love the little moments like the grandfather listening to broadcasts of poetry on the radio. There’s also a wonderful exuberance to so many of the characters, such as Boksoon.

Fluffy, silly, cute. A wonderful companion piece to Twentynine Palms. (Before anyone takes that seriously and views Twentynine Palms, please don’t, I’m kidding.)