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1. Review of the Thor movie. I really liked Tom Hiddleston as Loki; he doesn't make the mistake a billion actors playing Iago have made, signalling to the rafters, from his first line on, that he's the bad guy, just because everyone in the audience already knows that he's the bad guy. Thanks to his choice to soft-pedal the oily duplicity, there was the totally unanticipated effect of making the people in the movie who didn't know from the start that he was the bad guy not seem like total idiots.
I've been avoiding the recent crop (by which I mean, within the last 20 years) of superhero movies, until I made the mistake of listening to the people who kept saying, "See Iron Man; it's actually good," and if that one's good, how truly execrable must the rest of them be? One of its lesser problems was, in fact, that the bad guy did not signal from the beginning that he was the bad guy, because it raised the question of what made him turn into the bad guy? At least Iago had a motive, if one insufficient for the cause.
2. Referendum on Scottish independence. Officials in the last Labour government insist a referendum would breach the Scotland Act 1998, which established the devolved parliament, since the constitution is reserved to Westminster. Salmond is adamant that as the referendum will be consultative, and not legally binding, it is lawful.
So ... he plans to consult the voters over whether they want to do something unconstitutional?
3. Critic going ga-ga over Citizen Kane. Author and one-time film critic Jorge Luis Borges, who loved Citizen Kane, thought the Rosebud motif its single major weakness. The film, he wrote, "has at least two plots. The first [is] of an almost banal imbecility ... At the moment of his death, [Kane] yearns for a single thing in the universe: a fittingly humble sled that he played with as a child!" Welles himself dismissed Rosebud as a "dollar-book Freudian gag." (For my disagreement with Welles and Borges, read on.)
No, I don't think I will read on. I'm delighted to discover that somebody else finds that plot gimmick as stupid as I do. Ruins the film, actually.
4. The Mississippi flood. And downriver in Louisiana, officials warned residents that even if a key spillway northwest of Baton Rouge were to be opened, residents could expect water 5- to 25-feet deep over parts of seven parishes. Some of Louisiana's most valuable farmland is expected to be inundated.
That's a good thing, actually. How do they think that farmland got so valuable in the first place? Centuries of Mississippi mud dumped onto it by repeated floods. Anything built in zones like that ought to be designed with the expectation that it'll get flooded at least a couple times a century. (Jack it up or move it away or tear it down and rebuild, whatever.)
I've been avoiding the recent crop (by which I mean, within the last 20 years) of superhero movies, until I made the mistake of listening to the people who kept saying, "See Iron Man; it's actually good," and if that one's good, how truly execrable must the rest of them be? One of its lesser problems was, in fact, that the bad guy did not signal from the beginning that he was the bad guy, because it raised the question of what made him turn into the bad guy? At least Iago had a motive, if one insufficient for the cause.
2. Referendum on Scottish independence. Officials in the last Labour government insist a referendum would breach the Scotland Act 1998, which established the devolved parliament, since the constitution is reserved to Westminster. Salmond is adamant that as the referendum will be consultative, and not legally binding, it is lawful.
So ... he plans to consult the voters over whether they want to do something unconstitutional?
3. Critic going ga-ga over Citizen Kane. Author and one-time film critic Jorge Luis Borges, who loved Citizen Kane, thought the Rosebud motif its single major weakness. The film, he wrote, "has at least two plots. The first [is] of an almost banal imbecility ... At the moment of his death, [Kane] yearns for a single thing in the universe: a fittingly humble sled that he played with as a child!" Welles himself dismissed Rosebud as a "dollar-book Freudian gag." (For my disagreement with Welles and Borges, read on.)
No, I don't think I will read on. I'm delighted to discover that somebody else finds that plot gimmick as stupid as I do. Ruins the film, actually.
4. The Mississippi flood. And downriver in Louisiana, officials warned residents that even if a key spillway northwest of Baton Rouge were to be opened, residents could expect water 5- to 25-feet deep over parts of seven parishes. Some of Louisiana's most valuable farmland is expected to be inundated.
That's a good thing, actually. How do they think that farmland got so valuable in the first place? Centuries of Mississippi mud dumped onto it by repeated floods. Anything built in zones like that ought to be designed with the expectation that it'll get flooded at least a couple times a century. (Jack it up or move it away or tear it down and rebuild, whatever.)
