You Say Tomato

OK, Now This Really Does Qualify as a Personal Web Page

You’ve got to have a picture of your cat, right? And was there ever a cuter cat than Sooky?



And, erm, that's all!

Bum Wrap

Snopes says it's an urban legend that Japanese women are walking around in see-through skirts. No, they're just "prints on the skirts to make it look as if the panties are visible." Not that that helped when my boss came into my office just now as I was examining the evidence!

British Academy Film Awards 2003: The British Oscars

A quick response to the British Oscars that we watched in preference to the Grammys, which I suppose is evidence that I value movies more than music. (And more than penises, apparently, since I also chose it over the final episode of Oz!)

1. Although in theory I dislike Stephen Fry, in practice he’s a bloody good presenter/raconteur/wit. When Meryl Streep was reading Charlie Kaufman’s bizarre acceptance speech and misread “I’d like to spank—I’m sorry, I’d like to thank Spike Jonze,” it took a very quick mind to quip, “Thank goodness it wasn’t William Jones.” (But can we stop pretending that Donald Kaufman exists? “Neither Charlie nor Donald are here to accept it?” Puh-lease)

2. Pedro Almodóvar is the master of puzzling poetics. Like his mystifying speech when he won the best foreign-language Oscar for All About My Mother, even when the English was correct and even though his accent had improved, what he said sounded very poetic—moonlight, darkness, Iraq, captain—but didn’t make a whole heap of sense.

3. The acting challenge of the night seemed to be for U.S. actors not to give away their personal feelings when Pedro, Gael García Bernal, and Saul Zaentz made their anti-war comments. Meryl Streep and Jennifer Connelly were particularly effective at transmitting “blank face.”

4. The BBC zoomed right in on the “losers,” and I swear there was more openly displayed disappointment on display than you get at U.S. awards shows.

5. It might be a good idea to trim the number of ancient presenters. Lord Attenborough might be the chairman of the academy, but when he repeatedly referred to the potential winner of the Carl Foreman Award as “he” or said the winner would be able to use the cash payment to fund “his” next project, he seemed unaware that one of the nominees was a “she” who’d be using it for “her” next project. Surprise, surprise, the woman didn’t win. Michael Caine wasn’t that bad, but it was puzzling to see him reading her nomination script from a piece of paper. (Last-minute changes? TelePrompTer anxiety?)

6. For an irrational reason (perhaps Billy Elliott-related), I have taken against Stephen Daldry, who always seemed to have a naff look on his face whenever the camera pointed at him. Consequently, I took an evil pleasure in Philip Glass referring to him, throughout his acceptance speech as “Michael Daldry.”

7. Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Salma Hayek, Nicole Kidman: Bless! OK, and Catherine Zeta-Jones too.

Bend It Like Beckham

On Thursday night, R and I went to a preview screening of Bend It Like Beckham. I wasn’t sure that they’d manage to fill the cinema for a soccer movie whose title 99 percent of Americans will find incomprehensible, but when we got to the Guild 45th, there was a line all around the block—the usual free-film suspects, but also a bunch of youth soccer girls and lots of Indian families.

One of my co-workers refuses to see British movies—especially feelgood comedies in which downtrodden young people/miners/prisoners/widows/mixed-race families/unemployed steelworkers dance/blow brass instruments/garden/grow marijuana/sculpt sex organs/strip through the pain. Seen one brave escape from working class philistinism/Thatcher/criminality/poverty/grotty back streets/emasculating joblessness, you’ve seen them all, he reckons. I don’t disagree, but I must admit, I loved this movie.

It’s a feel-good fiesta, an uplift-athon: not just an escape narrative but also a sports story—two genres that offer few surprises. The working-class lad always gets the ballet scholarship; the soccer player always scores the winning goal. And in a film about an Indian family, mom and dad are always going to fret about the loss of traditional values while the next generation pushes up against the old ways. And yet, and yet … the film was knockout, magic, over the moon.

Jess is a tomboy: She wears trackies and loves to kick the bawl abaht. Her ma and pa are middle-class Sikhs who emigrated from Kenya decades ago. They live in a nice house in Hounslow, and dad works at Heathrow Airport. There’s a bit of "Goodness Gracious Me" head-bobbing action over Jess’ lack of marital prospects and her preference for watching soccer rather than perfecting her Punjabi cooking, but thank goodness sister Pinky has just got engaged. Jess talks to her posters of David Beckham the way her mom prays to Baba Ji. When Jules, a young (gorgeous) white woman asks her to try out for the local women’s soccer team, Jess has to deceive her folks (not terribly convincingly) so she can train and fulfill her role as savior of the soccer squad. She’s torn between respecting her family and using her talent to help her team, and in the end—never!—she gets to do both.

Jess and Jules do the old 1-2 to perfection, are mistaken for a couple, fall out over a guy, but make up and score again just in time for the movie’s big finish. There’s adversity, there’s triumph over adversity, there’s a gorgeous, pouting bit of tracksuit trou for the girls to fight over. (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who plays the coach as a paragon of virtue and a fountain of sage advice, basically has the role of the “good girl” who shows up in most sports movies—the plucky, virtuous pretty thing who watches over the hero and motivates him along the path of righteousness.)

So what did I like? The acting was great. The only faces I recognized were Rhys-Meyers and the always awesome Juliet Stevenson, but there wasn’t a dud in the cast. Yes, there were a lot of “ish-shoes,” but overall they were nicely handled. Writer/director Gurinder Chadha’s always good with gayness (see, for example, Kyra Sedgwick and Juliana Margulies as seriously sexy lesbians in her very American film What’s Cooking?), but it was particularly well-done here, especially considering that, in the States at least, the film is going to be marketed to teens.

In her 1993 film Bhaji on the Beach (I guess Chadha has a thing for alliterative B-titles), there were some lovely—and profound—observations about immigration and assimilation. Ten years later things have changed a lot, and she showed the changes very nicely. Socially, Asians in Britain have moved on up; they’re established. Indian guys dress better, and they do the washing up. Racism is more subtle. White (and black) people aren’t grumbling about being swamped by immigrants, but they still ask the same old questions about arranged marriages and have fixed ideas about Indian families.

I have no idea how the movie will do in the States. The title is meaningless here; the soccer commentator cameos might as well be in Punjabi; and as is always the case, the British social signifiers are lost on the American audience. Still, I hope it does well. A feel-good movie that makes you feel good deserves success.

NOTE: I had to redo this entry because for some reason the permalinks didn't work on the posts I made this morning. By deleting the original, I also deleted the comments that Pam and Anita had made. Many apologies for that. I'd love to have more comments on this site, so I feel particularly bad about deleting some of the few that I receive. Nothing personal, I promise!

Is My Accent Haut or Naut?

audblog audio post
I fear the sound quality of this audio post is rather poor because my phone, while it is capable of inducing "a technology boner that could cut glass," isn't always the best, you know, phone. Plus, I'm a mumbler. And, since the Sidekick's keyboard requires me to do an Alt-command to type the pound sign, there's a bit of goofy space at the end.

Still, since I'm really curious about other bloggers' accents, I figured it was only polite to show you mine. Do you think there's a meme in the making here?

I forgot I had promised to whistle. Since I've now used my free trial audblog posting, does this mean I'm going to have to pony up the $3 per month for a subscription?

Mainstream Movie Catch-Up

In a lot of ways this is a kind of dead zone for movies. Once the self-appointed Oscar hopefuls open in the last week or two in December, they tend to stick around in theaters until a) they fail to get nominated in mid-February; b) one movie (usually crap) comes out of Oscar night a big winner (then it stays around forever, while the others finally, mercifully depart and free up some movie screens); or c) the theater-owners finally decide everyone who wants to has had an opportunity to see the big movies and finally take pity and puts on something else.

Because I’ve found myself stuck with nothing to see all too often at this time of year, I went too far in the opposite direction this year, prioritizing movies that weren’t going to enjoy a three-month engagement. But now, for one reason and another, I worry that when Oscar night comes around there’ll be some contenders that I haven’t seen. Even for the British Academy Film Awards, which BBC America showed live and commercial-free this afternoon but which I taped because I was at the movies, I still need to see The Pianist and The Quiet American before I’d be allowed to vote under Troubled Diva/foreign-language film Oscar rules.

Still, I’ve done a bit of catching up in recent weeks, ticking off Adaptation, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Hours, and Chicago.

As far as Adaptation goes, you can count me in the “liked it OK until it jettisoned its conceit three-quarters’ way through” camp. That old enjoyment-squasher high expectations may be one reason I was underwhelmed. After Being John Malkovich, I had very high hopes for another Spike Jonze-Charlie Kaufman collaboration, but this time around it fell short of the “brilliant and incredibly innovative” mark and got stuck at “self-consciously trying to be edgy.” One pleasant surprise: I had forgotten what a wonderful actress Meryl Streep is. Twenty years ago (Jesus, I never thought I’d begin a sentence that way), I would make a point of seeking out and seeing every one of her movies as soon as they came out. Julia, Manhattan, The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs. Kramer, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, even Plenty. But after Defending Your Life in 1991, I think the only Streep movie I saw in a theater was 1994’s The River Wild (!), then nothing until Adaptation. She’s one of those actors who are made for the movies (like Michael Caine): Her performance seems effortless; there’s nothing “actorly” about it. Plus she’s lovely. In Adaptation, the contrast with the very artificial, effortful Nicolas Cage was astounding. There he is huffing and puffing and letting us know he’s an actor; there she is just sort of inhabiting the role and being totally convincing. (The worst “I’m an ACT-or” offender is Edward Norton. I really enjoyed The 25th Hour, but throughout the movie you're aware of a guy laboriously playing a part.)

The Two Towers? Well, I’m not its demographic. I saw the first one as a work “morale event” (the most morale-enhancing part of those movie screening trips is being away from e-mail for three hours, of course; well, that and the free snacks), and I enjoyed it well enough, but it didn’t make me want to go out and read the books or anything (a common enough reaction judging from my pals’ reading habits in December 2001). Considering it’s the middle bit, the narrative was strong—I was never restless or bored, and the effects are spectacular and strangely convincing—but there weren’t really any actors for me to connect with. In The Fellowship of the Ring Ian Holm and Sir Ian McKellen made Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf into real characters; in this movie the complex characters were absent for most of the time. There are characters who are onscreen a lot, but they didn’t seem particularly real or likable. (OK, Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn is a decent enough character, although a bit too much of a goody-goody for my tastes, but his beard annoys me. The dwarf and the elf, or whatever Legolas is, I could very easily live without.) Still, there’s no doubt Peter Jackson did an incredible job with this series of movies. John Scalzi predicts that Jackson will get a special Oscar for the trilogy. That would surprise me, but I don’t see why he couldn’t win best director (and maybe best picture) next year—after all, the two-thirds I’ve seen so far are certainly of superior quality to most Oscar-winning movies, and let’s let go of the fantasy that the academy rewards high-brow pointy-head movies. (Should you doubt, I direct you to the Best Picture winners for 1990, 1994, 1995, 1997, 2000, and 2001.)

The Hours? Precious, historically iffy, and heavy sledding in parts, but saved by some fabulous acting. Although at times it was hard to know what was going on inside Clarissa’s head, Meryl Streep was always in control; she never seemed lost. Julianne Moore is always so damned convincing—she’s another actress who’s always in command of her character. I’ve been a fan of Nicole Kidman’s since the TV mini-series Bangkok Hilton, but I’m not sure she was right for the role of Virginia Woolf, with or without the prosthetic proboscis. Still, the movie had a strong emotional impact, and that counts for a lot in my book.

And then there was Chicago. Having just seen this just a few hours ago, I’m stunned it got so many Oscar nominations. As an exemplar of a lost genre, I understand that the academy—largely made up, after all, of actors who spent a fortune on voice and dance classes—wants to revive the musical, but it’s so darned run-of-the-mill, obvious, and unsexy. Catherine Zeta-Jones shows that we Welshwomen are gifted with great pipes (yeah, yeah, I’m a Mancunian, but I’m ethnically Welsh and that’s what counts over here); Renée Zellweger is a bloody good actress, a decent singer, and an iffy dancer (though she’s got a great pair of gams); Richard Gere’s awfully good-looking and a not-terrible singer; Queen Latifah rocks; John C. Reilly plays the part John C. Reilly always plays (which makes him one of the actors I’d most like to hang out with for a few days—I’d love to know if he’s anything like the schlubs he’s always cast as), but giving four of those five a 1-in-5 chance of winning an Oscar? I don’t think so. As much as I love Queen Latifah, I just can’t see that even after that spectacular dance number (the only bit of true raunch in the whole film), her performance was award-worthy. Though I suppose after Judi Dench won best supporting actress for about 10 minutes of screen time in Shakespeare in Love, all bets are off.

Here and There

An excellent Slate “Diary” this week from my former co-worker Moira Redmond, now back in Britain (and backing Britain, I’m sure) after six years in these United States. Some lovely comparisons between life over here and over there—better service in shops over here; sexier journos with better moisturizer over there. The stunned silence of American neighbors when told the kids were getting their dad a nice stripey jumper for his birthday (“jumper” being American for “pinafore dress”) reminded me of the reaction I got when I told my fellow Delaware graduate students that my mam had sent me a dozen pairs of knickers for Christmas (no, I don’t know why I brought it up either). Apparently they were trying to picture me in a stunning array of golfing-style plus-fours.

A Whistling Woman

This morning, while reading the paper, I experienced that combo thrill/disappointment that crops up when you come across someone doing some crazy thing you’ve always fantasized about. The fact that someone else is doing it confirms that your dream really could come true. Unfortunately, the novelty is now gone, and with it your chance of gaining fame and fortune with your highly original idea. The story? “In a Dark Lair, a Phantom of the Opera Trills,” the tale of Columbia freshman Michael Barimo who is about to make his debut as a professional whistler.

Whistling was going to be my ticket to the big time! I’ve always been musical, but also lazy. Much too lazy to actually master an instrument (I’m not counting the recorder, because even during primary school assemblies I would get confused and play a B when I was meant to play a C, so I never even got to play the descant recorder, the musical equivalent of a big pencil). I demonstrated my raw but undisputable musicality by virtuoso whistling.

Throughout my childhood, I was admonished that “A whistling woman and a crowing hen frightens the devil out of his den.” Jeez, could they make it any more attractive? I spent hours working on my fancy show pieces, hoping to raise Lucifer, but all I got was the neighbor asking me to pipe down because her husband was on nights. One day I thought my big chance had come: At a primary school concert, the pianist couldn’t make it, so an adult was going around asking the gels who were learning the piano if they knew the pieces and could step in and play. “I can whistle!” I said, as excited as a kid who’d just watched Judy Garland and her pals put on a show in someone’s dad’s barn could be. The adults just rolled their eyes and sighed, “We know, June, we know.”

Six years ago I got braces, and one of my worst fears was it would mess with my whistling. For a while there I lost my vibrato and trill, but if I do say so myself, even with a mouthful of metal, I was still a superior sibilator. During this three-year period, I heard a piece on NPR about a whistling champion and his struggle to rise to the top of the cut-throat world of whistling. It was hell—finally, competitive whistling was getting its media moment and I was on the orthodontic reserve, unable to do my best work. It’s as heartbreaking as a modern pentathlete having Montezuma’s revenge the week of the Olympic trials. (Actually, whistling is a favorite NPR topic. In the last year alone they’ve done features about a deceased whistler and a pro whistler.)

Well, I think you can already guess what my first audblog post will be. And sure, I take requests.

What a Cover-Up

So, the good folks at the United Nations have taken to covering up the U.N. headquarters’ copy of Picasso’s masterwork “Guernica” whenever folks are discussing whether or not to declare war on Iraq. As Maureen Dowd put it in this morning’s New York Times, “Mr. Powell can't very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, children, bulls and horses.”

The first time I lived in Madrid, back in 1983 or ’84, “Guernica” was a regular part of our Sunday morning routine. Before they finished the special room of the Museo Reina Sofia, the painting was housed in the Cason de Buen Retiro, and I think entrance was free. (We didn’t have much dosh at the time, so I can’t imagine we would have visited quite so often if we’d had to pay.) The routine was a lingering breakfast in Chueca (then a hippy hash zone, now a booming gay mecca), a stroll in the Retiro, then a peek at shrieking and mutilated women, men, children, bulls, and horses. (Actually, in some ways my favorite bit of the display were the various sketches and drawings—there’s something so intimate about looking at someone’s early drafts.)

I’m sure there must’ve been some barrier between the crowds and the painting back in its temporary home, but in its current permanent residence, there’s a monster wall of glass that, while perfectly understandable, makes for a pretty crappy “user experience.”

Cracking piece of art, though!

Handicapping the Oscars

SIFF-goer Ken Rudolph is on the academy's foreign-language film committee, so he's been going to screenings of this year's 54 nominees since last December. His journal makes for great reading, and after the last screening on Thursday, he promises to make his predictions for the final five. (Actual nominations come out next Tuesday.)

Killer Kids

This weekend I saw a couple of movies set in places where life is worth very little: City of God and Gaza Strip. The first, a Brazilian movie set in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, is based on a true story—the 1970s gang war between Li’l Zé and Carrot—and the other is a documentary about life in the Gaza Strip, filmed in 2001.

City of God is a great film—and since I was able to watch it without hiding my face from the unrelenting violence, I guess I was right in thinking that what made it hard for me to watch Gangs of New York was all that knife-play. By focusing on kids—who move seamlessly from playing soccer to robbing gas trucks—the movie centers on the point where they can decide between a life of crime and the path of righteousness.

Violence—bullets to the head at point-blank range, not school-bags at 10 paces—comes as naturally to these kids as eating. In some ways it’s work—you can either bust your hump for pocket change or shoot your way into the drug business—but it’s also how you show your smarts. The quick and clever way to win is to kill your rivals, and there’s no reason to get sentimental—if hoods aren’t killed by other hoods, the chances are the police will gun them down with little or no provocation. And besides, if you don’t kill them, they might kill you.

Although the movie’s narrator/protagonist, Rocket, is a little hard to believe (he dreams of becoming a famous newspaper photographer, and sure enough the crime wars in the City of God provide him with an opportunity), most of the characters really existed. In the final credits, shots of the actors are placed alongside photographs of the real hoods, and an entire scene from the movie is shown to be an exact reproduction of an actual event; we know because we see the real thing.

Gaza Strip is real contemporary horror: Director James Longley took his camera to the Gaza Strip in January 2001 and spent three months following the lives of people—mostly kids—he met there.

It’s a very effective way of showing what’s going on. Most of the time it appears as if Longley was standing in the street (the bare squares and refugee camps of Gaza bear an uncanny resemblance to City of God’s favelas) when shots or bombs or gas attacks would suddenly rain down. One of the most shocking segments is a series of interviews with young people who found themselves in the middle of a gas attack. The Israeli government claims it was tear gas, but the hypertonic spasms it set off look more like the effects of nerve gas. (The movie returns to hospital emergency rooms several times—a shocking and effective place to shoot.)

The kid who speaks the most is a 13-year-old illiterate newspaper vendor from Gaza City called Mohammed. At times he’s astonishingly articulate, at others he spouts empty slogans about martyrdom and homeland. A review of the movie in the Seattle Weekly complained that “Little Mohammed is little more than a puppet, a robot programmed to weep for his slain buddies and mumble rote phrases about wanting to be a martyr,” but given his biography—about 18 months of school and little to do but hawk his papers, hang out with his friends, and throw stones at Israelis—it would be hard for him to escape his programming. Besides, he expresses himself so well, he’s more than a robot, he’s an extraordinary kid.

The thing that makes Gaza Strip unique is its unerring focus on the strip’s residents. We’re told that Israelis have blocked the borders, we hear them shooting at the kids throwing stones at the crossings, and we hear them bulldozing buildings and see the rubble they create, but we never see their faces or hear from them directly. It isn’t fair, but it’s not meant to be. No one is blameless—the rocks the kids are chucking could kill the Israelis on the other side, and I didn’t doubt the sincerity of their desire for martyrdom (the wisdom is another thing); in those life circumstances, Paradise beckons quite temptingly.

One thing that didn’t go down so well was the haranguing tone of the representative from Arab Film Distribution who spoke to the Little Theatre's jam-packed crowd at the film’s end. He said the Weekly’s reviewer had no right to express his opinion of the film; racist expressions like that shouldn’t be allowed, the guy said. There’s no doubt that the Israeli government shapes Western perceptions of the situation in the occupied territories, and there’s no doubt that information about what goes on there is controlled and repackaged for external consumption, but restricting the free press in the United States isn’t the way to gain sympathy for the injustices there. In fact, that attitude is part of the problem.

In Which I Make a Spectacle of Myself

I’ve been wearing glasses since I was 6. I’d needed them for a long time before then, it’s just that I was never tested until I went to school. Looking back, we probably didn’t need the test to figure out that I was as blind as a bat: Until I got specs, I fell over or slipped and fell head-first into the furniture about 20 times per week. For some reason, my mam was convinced the best treatment for a blow to the head was to spread butter on the bump. Consequently, I was very hard to catch for the first five years of my life—you just couldn’t get purchase. It must’ve cost my family a fortune: As they were always reminding me, best butter is not cheap. The first week that I got my glasses I dutifully provided a “children say the darnedest things” moment: As I read my comics, I announced to my mam, “Hey, they’ve made the print bigger this week!”

Not a waking moment goes by that I don’t wear my glasses. Officially, I’m far-sighted, but I can’t see close-up without correction, either, so I guess it’s neither here nor there. A bunch of my friends have had the Lasik surgery, and they’re all happy, but my vision is too crappy to qualify—I’d still have to wear glasses afterward, so why bother. The only time I wish I could see unaided is when I’m getting a haircut or having some dental procedure where they ask, “What do you think?” and I have to remind them that even though I’m looking at a mirror, I can’t see a thing unless they hand me my specs.

Since I wear them full-time, I change my glasses every couple of years. I’ve never been one for choosing glasses to go with each day’s outfit—you get used to the peripheral vision or the prescription in one pair, and it always goofs me up to chop and change too much. So usually when I get new glasses, the old ones go into retirement.

I have made some bad choices over the years—I brought back a couple of horrors from my first trip to the States: some giant frames that made Deirdre Barlow’s now-discarded monsters seem small, and a cool Diane Keaton in Annie Hall pair that I wore for a couple of years despite the fact that they were way too big for me and had to undergo such extensive melting and crunching in order to stay on my head that it’s a miracle they stayed in one piece.

Sometimes the prescription just doesn’t feel right—I went to great lengths to select my last-but-three pair, but I just couldn’t wear them. Since I spend at least eight hours a day staring at a computer screen and another three or four gazing at newspapers, magazines, or books, if I don’t feel comfortable reading in them, chances are they’re not going to last. That ill-fated pair-but-three got about three months of use before I switched full-time to the much cheaper reading glasses I was intending to wear only in the office. Fortunately, they were cute.


These glasses just never felt right

The "reading glasses" that took their place

The pair that I’ve worn for the last couple of years are fabulous. I like the style (they’re by a Japanese designer and definitely qualify for what Mr. Diva would describe as “classics with a twist”) and I adjusted to the prescription immediately. They’ve started to slip down my face a bit in the last few months, but it’s nothing a little adjustment couldn’t fix. Still, at the end of last year I went back into glasses shopping mode because I had about $1,200 left in my flexible savings account.* So, judging from the number of people sporting new glasses at this time of year, I did what a lot of people with imperfect vision do and went to pick out some new frames.


My current classics-with-a-twist

My current "film star" sunglasses

The woman who helped me was phenomenal. As R put it, her affect was a bit inauthentic, but her advice about frame shapes and colors was spot-on. I didn’t rush into anything—I made a couple of visits, taking digital photos of me in various frames so that I could ponder them at home. In the end I settled on a serious-looking pair of FreudenHaus frames that boast the big new thing: skullwraps, which grip your head rather than curving over your ears in the traditional fashion. (Unfortunately, this can make your hair stick up if it gets trapped in the wrap.) I had a bit left over (because my vision is so dreadful, my lenses alone cost several hundred dollars because I have to have the ultrathin high-index lenses made by Zeiss to avoid the Coke-bottle-bottom look of my youth), so I also picked out some frames for sunglasses, this time from Beausoleil.


The newbies

I’ve had the FreudenHaus glasses for about three weeks now and I’ve worn them for a total of about 40 minutes. (I haven’t picked up the sunglasses yet—they’re not really necessary in Seattle at this time of year.) The problem is that the prescription feels off. I feel like I’m straining to read. I'll see if the opticians have any ideas when I go to pick up the sunglasses, but for the moment I feel like a dumb-ass for spending so much time pondering frames and no time at all wondering if having my eyes tested at an HMO was the best option. It may have been a classic false economy.

(*Note to non-U.S. readers: Some companies allow employees to deposit up to $5,000 per year into an account that can be used to pay for non-reimbursed medical/dental/optical expenses. The cool thing is that the contributions are pre-tax and you can draw on the whole amount right at the beginning of the year, even though you’ve only paid in 1/24th or whatever of your contributions. The catch is that you have to spend all the money you’ve put aside by Dec. 31 or you lose it; there’s no rollover. Since I’ve usually exhausted my dental benefits by the end of January, I put aside $5,000 each year for dental expenses, but last year because of the timing of appointments and having to wait for things to settle, I wasn’t able to put all my FSA money in my mouth.)

What To Do in Case of Fire

I’ve been terribly remiss about posting my responses to the movies I see, and since I’ve found that to be useful when arguing with friends with different movie tastes, I’m going to try to catch up.

So, the most distant—and thus, I fear, most forgotten—is What To Do in Case of Fire, which I saw at the Varsity the first week in January. (Yesterday I noticed they had the DVD at my local video store when I ran down there at 10 p.m. desperate for the second and third bits of Smiley’s People, which I had made the bad mistake—getting-things-done-wise—to start watching earlier in the evening.)

I don’t speak German, I’ve spent very little time there (a Christmas/New Year vacation back in the early ‘80s when I went with my then-girlfriend to visit her German family [her mother left just after the war, leaving behind her parents and siblings], and a day or maybe two when I accompanied 40 Spanish villagers on a three-week coach ride from Madrid to Oslo), and until a couple of years ago, I didn’t care for German movies. The only ones I can remember seeing were at the film festival, and they always seemed to involve an attractive straight man finding himself in the middle of a group of gay men who fall over themselves trying to bed him, or prejudiced policemen having to disguise themselves as gay men so they can solve a crime. Along came Tom Tykwer and I softened (yes, Run Lola Run is exciting and innovative, but my favorite of his movies is The Princess and the Warrior).

Then in the last couple of years, a few movies that, broadly speaking, look at the politics of the East/West division or examine the adjustment of Communist and anarchist radicals after the fall of the Berlin Wall made it to Seattle, and my attitude changed completely: Now I actively seek out contemporary German movies. The first such film that comes to mind is The Legend of Rita, Volker Schlöndorff’s portrait of a radical full of joie de terreur (she attends bomb camp in Lebanon and kills for the cause) who flees the West for the revolutionary idyll of East Germany, a place where she’s miserable and her life is horribly proscribed, until the fall of the Wall, when she … well, let’s just say things don’t quite work out for Rita. Schlöndorff is slightly condescending to the political faithful—as I recall there’s some suggestion that Rita was driven as much by her taste for revolutionary nookie as by her commitment to the cause—but it’s a thoughtful film that’s not entirely dismissive of the notion of living your convictions, no matter how extreme.

Next was No Place To Go, one of those movies that I sense I’m only appreciating a tiny portion of just because although I know a bit of the back story, I don’t really have the context to understand it fully. No Place To Go shows the final few months in the life of a German writer who had been successful in the ‘60s, and who, despite her love of beautiful, expensive things (she’s broke but her apartment is incredibly stylish and she spends her last marks on a divine designer outfit), maintains that she despises the petty bourgeois Western lifestyle and is committed to “real socialism.” When the Berlin Wall comes down, she feels ideologically adrift, moves to Berlin, bugs her son and his wife, drives her East German publisher crazy, and ends up wandering drunk and more than a little crazy into an East German village where all her illusions about living under socialism are shattered. The director, Oskar Röhler, is the son of the writer Gisela Elsner, whose biography, according to this site bears a huge resemblance to the movie’s main protagonist.

And now, coming full circle to What To Do in Case of Fire, which is definitely lighter fare than Rita or No Place To Go. (It really does complete the circle because sexy anarchist Tim is played by Til Schweiger, who was the star of one of those straight men in gayville movies I mentioned at the top—1994’s Maybe, Maybe Not.) Six former members of an ‘80s commune/radical AV club reunite at their old squat when a bomb they planted more than a decade ago explodes and they scramble to retrieve a piece of evidence from police custody. Two of the group are still living the anarchist protester squatter lifestyle—though the block’s now empty and the landlord is desperate to evict them—one’s a single mom, and the other three are yuppies. After the initial setup, the film veers between a daft comedy caper and a serious examination of the triumph of capitalism. At the end, they conclude that the war is no longer between left and right but rather between the winners and the poor slobs who refused to sell out, whichever side they used to be on.

These are tricky times for philosophical comedies about terrorists, albeit well-meaning nonviolent ones (a comment on the Internet Movie Database takes reasonable issues with the movie’s premise because “a terrorist is still a terrorist”), but since that’s what it took to bring other characters into the mix (an old police adversary, for example, has more in common with the former freedom fighters than he does with a young colleague who’s obsessed with computers and public relations), I didn’t mind.