Wonderful. I thought Bad Education was not too hot, so I’m thrilled to say Almodovar is back with this one!

I don’t think this should be rated one way or the other. It is a very interesting experiment and requires an open minded viewer.

dear god this was awful.

We like going to Palace of Asia (formerly Bombay Cuisine) in NJ because they tend to serve more than just the typical buffet fare, and the quality of the food is excellent. Aside from a wonderful chili paneer, the other previously unfamiliar dish they were serving last week was a dessert called Falooda. I liked it very much, and can best describe it as a bowl of melted ice cream w/ soap, tapioca, and licorice whips in it. It was rose flavored (hence the soap attribution), the licorice whips are really noodles, the ice cream is really ice cream, and I have no idea what the tapioca things really are. India continues to win the ongoing delightfully bizarre desserts competition.

The cheesesteak is king in my part of town, but even Tony Luke’s gets tiresome after a while. Luckily, O Sandwiches and a dozen other joints on Washington Ave. serve Bahn Mi. I love the daikon, carrots, and hot pepper all cool and zingy against the warm savory meats. Perfect marriage of tidy french sanwiches w/ simple contrasting flavors of southeast asia. I have to add that the place at 8th and Christian, a hole in the wall to be sure, makes the best Vietnamese hoagies.

I’m sorry I didn’t like this more. It just couldn’t compare to his other works, though I did find the noirish/hardboiled aspect of this interesting – reminded me of Jim Thompson a bit. Alas, I cared much more for the character Moss than I did for anyone else, and his death was so premature as to render the last few sections of the book completely uninteresting. It seemed unfocused, unstructured, meandering… lacked the clarity of vision and intensely honed language of the border trilogy.

This one has a wonderful passage in which the surgeon climbs some ancient steps into a crater, visits a buddhist temple, and communes w/ the wildlife including an orangatang

Malick continues to be among my favorite film directors. The most frequent form of praise mustered for this film around the web seems to be people congratulating themselves for having not fallen asleep while viewing it. I don’t know why they’re so surprised. the New World held me, as have all of Malick’s previous films, rapt from start to finish. Disparate settings and periods aside, each of Malick’s films address the same poetic issues of a journey undertaken, a natural world that stands outside history, and death- to paint it w/ the broadest strokes possible. Roger Ebert, in his review, makes the astute point that Malick wisely stays away from knowing the history that follows from where this story leaves off.

I just don’t like seventies movies. Nonsense.

I don’t even care if Hodel has solved the case or not. If he did and the Black Dahlia’s killer was indeed his father, how bizarre and fascinating! If he didn’t, and the BD’s killer wasn’t his father, how equally bizarre and fascinating that Hodel thinks he was!

I like this review of the book (starts w/ “Say the fifites?” about halfway down)
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/04/0604/061404.html