undyingking | The Illusionist etc (Reply)

Another film -- we've been to the pictures more these last couple of weeks than we did all winter -- and a pretty OK one I thought. Nineteenth-century stage magicians, especially ones with wildly wandering mittel-European acents, are likely to be silly in many ways, and so it was. But this was not a problem because the film was pleasingly unambitious. Unlike so many Hollywood films it didn't aim at epic sweep, hosts of characters and plots, and thunking great homilies on life. Instead it was just a short story idea carefully filmed and holding itself together nicely, with [what I read as] a bit of anti-Bush allegory riding alongside. Fun, and reasonably clever, although the twist ending (it's fairly obvious there's going to be one, but there could still be an interesting challenge in trying to see how it will work) is a bit of a cheat as it relies on technology and information not available to the viewer. Worth seeing unless the subject matter atomatically puts you off.

And we caught the back half of the beautiful lunar eclipse, by some distance the best one that I can remember ever having seen. Hooray for quaint solar system geometry!

In other slightly boring news, we're making a start on doing out the library / second spare room, which is going to be mostly a colour known as Pugin Red, approximating to the interior of a womb. Sadly the walls aren't going to be up to hanging shelves full of books off them, so we're going to have to lash out on bookcases or similar. Boo! -- why is it everything to do with houses costs twice as much as you think it's going to?