Because of Hugh Laurie, I watched the first episode of House, M.D., and that was enough: if the premiere is so formulaic (mysterious and scary illness, misdiagnosis, misdiagnosis, affirmation of the value of human life, intuitive leap, happy ending) there’s little hope. Laurie, a brilliant comedian, deserves better material; I trust he is “crying all the way to the bank.” (Who coined that phrase?)
AFF’s Brainwash :: Freedom and Firefly
At Brainwash, Sara Hinson analyzes the frontier ethic represented by Mal Reynolds of Firefly.
(Only 33 days to go!)
As I may have mentioned before, I arrange my Netflix queue mostly by date. Since I caught up to my own birth, the number of movies per year has grown sharply, so this may be my longest post yet. ( . . more . . )
“I think the world has been run long enough by well-meaning professionals. We might give the amateurs a chance now.”
—Carol Fisher in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940)
Miyazaki’s film (ハウルの動く城) of Diana Wynne Jones’s novel Howl’s Moving Castle is pretty, of course, but the story got lost somewhere. The royal sorceress has an unexplained grudge against Howl, an eccentric but kind young wizard with an unexplained reputation for crimes against beautiful girls; several people are afflicted by curses; and there’s a war on. But true love puts things right in the end. Okay, whatever.
Why can’t the English learn to speak?
Got an idea just now that might sell a few copies: Monty Python Annotated for Americans, containing answers to such questions as “What dialect is Palin doing in this bit?”
This thought was prompted by watching My Fair Lady. In the first scene where Higgins shows his phonetic jottings to Eliza, I obviously had to pause, and found that I could read it no better than she could; most of the characters look like International Phonetic Alphabet, but if so they’re a nonsensical jumble – and what’s the alveolar click doing in Covent Garden? “Ha!” my housemate snorts. “They couldn’t find anyone who could put together the real thing?” They rarely do, of course, but this was a major production. . . Later I learn that it’s not IPA but an older scheme, the Visible Speech of A.M.Bell.