Vengeance and Porn Stars

Saturday
I meant to take today off and clean the house, as we’ve done little more than beat back the barnacles for several..erm..weeks. However, best laid plans and all that, and by noon I found myself elbow deep in research for two projects and brainstorming for several more. Overall, considering the week, it was a very productive sort of day. Tomorrow we have plans for supper with Gram, that kind of thing. We still try to do Sunday supper when we can get it together.

Sunday
Watched some good movies this week. Several of them foreign. So if you shutter over subtitles, ignore them. The first is the 1998 version of “The Count of Monte Cristo.’ It’s like 5 hours of vengeance. Good time. All in French, so learn to love those subtitles. After something like the first three hours I kept inserting French words into my normally English thoughts. But that’s another issue.

Also good, surprisingly enough, was “Adored: The Diary of a Porn Star.” Warning: if you don’t like watching guy-on-guy, don’t watch this. It’s tastefully done, in my opinion, and the beauty of the film overshadows anything to do with sex.

For a film in English, “Morvern Callar,” based on the book by Alan Werner was good. Again, kind of disturbing, but good. It’s about a girl whose boyfriend offs himself in their Scottish apartment and asks her to get his novel published. She takes his money, sends off the book, and heads to Spain. The publishers love the novel, but she changed the name, so they think she wrote it. A very visual film and without the big Hollywood explosions.

So, those are the main movie picks. Aside from tv series British comedy, such as the series “As Time Goes By” with Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer, and “Good Neighbors,” a BBC series about a couple who go self-sufficient in the ‘burbs. That’s just a good time.

As far as books, I’m back into research mode so it’s all about Victorian England, opium, and, strangely enough, U.S. Route 2, from Michigan to Washington state. And of course the usual spooks and shapeshifters, occasional murder mystery, Lolita by Nabokov, and The Golden Bowl by Henry James. What? Unfocused? Me?