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Wide Wonder of Broadway

The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Monday, May 26, 1997

Third day of a three day weekend means I had this morning to get caught up on some journals I have started reading. I got up to present time on Diary of a Young Squirrel and silentium amoris. I like coming in on the middle of a journal and going back to the beginning and reading till I reach the present. It's like time travel, getting closer and closer to the present.

When it was time for the festival, I set off walking down the hill to Broadway. I stopped off at My Favorite Pirogie and got a ham and cheese and a bacon, ham, cheese and green onion pirog. Yum! but I had to eat them on the way, and while standing in line, because the Broadway Perfomance Hall venue allows no eating inside the auditorium. I guess this is because it isn't only a movie theater, but also a concert hall and legitimate theater, and they want to keep it nice.

  • Such is Life
    I was looking forward to this Swedish movie with an English director, Colin Nutley. I have enjoyed his work before, with House of Angels and The Last Dance. Such is Life met my expectations, with quirky humor and good feeling. A woman who is a cocktail bar pianist wants to get married, but her live-in boyfriend (an advice-giving DJ!) is dubious about it. When she meets a wealthy older Norwegian industrialist, she is tempted.
  • Raroia, the Paradise Island
    A documentary. Director Torgny Anderberg first visited the South Pacific Island of Raroia in 1947 with the Kon-tiki voyage, then again to film a feature in 1961. He returns in 1996 to find out what happened to the islanders since. The French testing nuclear weapons really messed up his old friends' lives, not from radiation as much as from culture changes when they were encouraged to move to Tahiti, a much more developed island. But if they were such great friends of his, why is this his first contact with them in 35 years? My main impression of this movie was of the director sentimentalizing the islanders.
  • Dr. Wai in "the Scripture with No Words"
    Great martial arts with Jet Li! Li plays a writer in present-day Hong Kong, whose fictional alter ego, an Indiana Jones type, keeps crossing paths with fictional equivalents of his estranged wife and the office gang. Very funny and well paced. If you like this kind of thing, you will like this one. I like this kind of thing!
  • Idiot Box
    Ben Mendelsohn, an Australian actor that I have enjoyed, stars as one of a pair of dopey guys. I left in the middle of this, my first festival walkout, not because it was so terrible, but the sound was muddy and I was having trouble with the accents, and the story was depressing me. Picture "Beavis and Butthead" crossed with "Dog Day Afternoon". But on another occasion this might have been just the ticket, so don't let me keep you away!
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