P.S. everything smells of flounder

Another media-filled weekend, and apparently so much to say that it's been split into two posts of different tones. Um, this is the funnier one.

"Bad Education" (La Mala Educación, Spain, 2004)
In which Gael Garcia Bernal singing in a white wig and sequined dress trumps Cillian Murphy singing in a black wig and fringed dress.

A.k.a. Pedro Almodóvar Does Noir, With Mixed Results. Started out strong -- a broken bond between two now-reunited 20-somethings, a mysterious plot to blackmail a priest, a quasi-fictionalized account of romance and abuse at a Catholic boys' school, GG Bernal in three different roles (including the drag queen/hustler/thief Zahara), a story within a story within a story -- but the tone shifted and it fell short at the end. I expected a specific twist that didn't come. Still, many pouting Spaniards and Mexicans, an engaging story, and excellent sequences at the school. I liked it at the time but the more I think about it, the more ambivalent I feel. It's left me with the same semi-disturbed mix of pleasure and displeasure as Almodóvar's earlier "Talk To Her." More support for the argument that you can in fact judge your reaction to a movie by your reaction to its opening credits.

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"Nói" ("Nói Albínói," Iceland, 2003)
In which our albino hero attempts to maintain his sanity in the midst of the nutso inhabitants of a remote Icelandic village.

A great movie, with just the right kind of quirky humor offset by the main character's suffocating need to escape his frozen village. Our boy Powder Nói is an albino high school student so bright he channels electricity can't bear the drudgery of school or, for that matter, conventional small-town life. But he tries to break out in all the wrong ways. It doesn't help that everyone around him is subtly crazy: his mother, who bakes cakes with palm trees and wakes him up by shooting a musket out his bedroom window; Steve Buscemi his deadbeat dad, obsessed with karaoke, who attacks a piano with an axe; the bookseller, who chucks a volume of Kierkegaard in the trash when we first meet him; the French teacher, mesmerized by his own mayonnaise recipe. The only human around seems to be Kirsten Dunst the bookseller's daughter. I won't say too much more because it would spoil the plot, but suffice it to say it featured tea-reading with Trelawney the fortune-telling mechanic, a grave-digging job, a vat of spilled blood, and -- no, that's all I can say. Further notable for having a main character who's an albino without once mentioning albinism except in the title. Much recommended if you can get your hands on it.

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Having finished the Bunker book Saturday night (see last post), yesterday I read Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, a set of about 22 remarkable clinical cases the neurologist had treated or tried to treat over several decades. Some of them were interesting (chemical-induced disembodiment! aphasics seeing through Nixon's propaganda! a man whose memories stop in 1945!), others were old news (the book came out in 1998 but some of the stories had been published as far back as the '70s). He tended to wander into the "human"/emotional/philosophical side of the stories rather than the clinical, which to be fair was his stated goal, and to preach about how even the most confounding or mentally defective patients are people too, which might have made more of a splash when the articles were first published. I enjoyed the descriptions over the commentary for the most part, preferring to draw my own conclusions from his stories instead of having him tell me what to make of them. All in all not bad, not amazing; there are probably better books of its kind out there, perhaps including Sacks' own Awakenings.

My dad put on the Olympics last night and we made fun of the announcers while I secretly ogled athletes in Spandex. By the time the cross-country 4x10 relay was over, according to the stream of metaphors, the skiers were driving a bus on a train in a field lying in weeds playing cat-and-mouse with hammers in their hands. In Torino.

"House" is on tonight (schedule switch) but my horribly influential sister has convinced me to tape it and see "Tristram Shandy" instead, so you may be spared an earful about Wilson until later this week. I'm just so glad he's been used in these past couple of episodes and that he will continue to be used in the next few. Take that as you will.