Movie Clips of Killing, Maiming, Typing with a Clever Song Underneath about Writing Mystery Novels

Thank you, Gayle.

I Have Won the Leaf Lottery

I picked January 10, and Leaf Commissioner Richard Anderson announced yesterday that the last leaf had fallen. Here are the names of the other contestants and their misbegotten picks:

That last leaf has fallen and Michael is this season's champion.

> Total jackpot -- $13.
>
> Leaf Person Last Leaf Date
> Richard Anderson 12/19/2009
> Paula Lawrence 12/29/2009
> Gayle Feyrer 1/1/2010
> Tashery Shannon 1/2/2010
> Michael Robertson 1/10/2010
> Kay Anderson 1/14/2010
> Doris Anderson 1/15/2010
> Linwood Johnson 1/23/2010
> Jennifer Brown 1/28/2010
> Patrick Daugherty 1/29/2010
> Anna Damski 2/4/2010
> Reah Carrick 2/10/2010
> Kim Beeman 2/14/2010

As you can see, it was a close thing. I credit my victory to the ten-base system -- the final two digits of the year drove the selection of the specific date. This, you might conclude, is something less than an exercise in ratiocination, perhaps falling somewhat short of Holmesian deduction, even the Robert Downey Jr. version. But if the goddess chooses to bless me, I will let her open the door and walk through, for once the coquette rather than the cavalier.

I will plow this year's pot of $13 back into the pot for next year. If The Leaf Lottery is going to continue to expand -- already it has contestants in London and Dubai -- there must be a financial incentive. It's just my giving back to the sport.

Here's a video that gives some sense of the greatness that is the leaf lottery.

It is Human Nature to Connect the Dots, Which is Bad in That It Leads to Generating Conspiracy Theories But Good for Approaching Certain Movies

Last night I dined with Big Pat, Gayle and Richard at Gayle and Richard's, a fine evening topped off with a viewing on their Great Wall of Plasma of "Smilla's Sense of Snow." I think we all agreed that we very much enjoyed watching the movie, even as the plot went very slowly awry in the second half.

But that was all right because Julia Ormond was intense, thorny, off-putting and thus devastatingly attractive, and the scenes in Copenhagen and Greenland were unfamiliar and beautifully shot. There's a fine line between context and travelogue, and I think "Smilla" was well short of scenery for scenery's sake.

Though I do like scenery.

Very much enjoying a movie, flaws and all, is perplexing. That's not right, you think. One should say one liked this or that in the movie but not The Movie.

I was perplexed enough to wander over to rottentomatoes where what to my wondering eyes should appear but a paragraph from Roger Ebert that nailed how I felt about the movie:

Here is a movie so absorbing, so atmospheric, so suspenseful and so dumb, that it proves my point: The subject matter doesn't matter in a movie nearly as much as mood, tone and style. ``Smilla's Sense of Snow'' is a superbly made film with one of the goofiest plots in many moons. Nothing in the final 30 minutes can possibly be taken seriously, and yet the movie works. Even the ending works, sort of, because the film has built up so much momentum.

To which I say: yes. But not duh. I'm not confident enough about this approach to say duh.

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The Guy Said, 'Your Taste is in Your Mouth'

Trembling with excitement yesterday anticipating an evening watching a much-praised movie with friends on friends' Great Wall o' TV as I like to call it, though not in its presence because if I piss it off it looks powerful enough to fry me with microwaves at a hundred yards.

The classic in question was The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp, which Miz Gayle had procured because it was Michael Powell handiwork, and she was up to what cinephiles are always up to, that is, working through the oeuvre of the masters.

Now I had seen the damn thing back in grad school days but had a kind of amnesia about it, remembering only the principal actor and his gravelly voice. I just assumed I had been stunned with wonder at the time, which explained the fact my memory of the film was a circle around a vacancy.

So down we sat and within I'd say five minutes we were aware we were in for an evening of sociology. That is, the movie seemed kind of bad in terms of crisp, clear plotting and character motivation -- nice technicolor, though -- but it certainly did encourage us to engage in a bit of reverse engineering as we tried to figure out why the Brits made this movie right in the middle of War World II, when things were still in doubt.

(Released 1943, so probably made early that year or even in 1942, just when the Yanks started coming?)

The argument *seemed to be* that there were some good Germans, at least the ones who fled the country as the Nazis gained power -- though some who claimed that category were probably spies, so watch out -- and more to the point the British needed to fight dirty or at least fight sneaky to win the war because THE BRITISH YOU KNOW ARE JUST SO KIND AND FAIR.

So you wonderful old farts, get with the program.

It was kind of fun as a study of the limits propaganda places on art in a democracy in time of war against that great luxury in an opponent, to wit absolute evil -- though look at how brilliant wartime propaganda can be, as in Casablanca -- and Deborah Kerr played three separate parts spread over 40 years, women who looked exactly alike but weren't even related, but Miz Gayle said it probably meant she was a kind of placeholder, the ideal of British womanhood, which from one point of view suggested to a certain kind of British man women of a certain cast of face and mind were pretty much interchangeable.

Good job, Gayle. The active mind creates meaning, not un-Sibyl-like, and finds the fun.

We agreed it was maybe * or 1.5* out of five. And then I find this at wikipedia.

• David Mamet has written: "My idea of perfection is Roger Livesey (my favorite actor) in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (my favorite film) about to fight Anton Walbrook (my other favorite actor)."^[13]

Maybe they sent us the outtakes???????

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