Midnight in men

President Nixon on his life:

“journey to the mountaintop and the despair of life’s deepest valley”.

Are all men in time turning into self-parodies of themselves (look at Murdoch, Reagan, Ted Kennedy, Mao, Hemingway) unless they are lucky to die early enough (JFK, F. Scott Fitzgerald).

There may be exceptions like Eastwood and Philip Roth, but it may just be too early to tell.

The connection is Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

Incendies

Saw an intense movie called Incendies by Canadian scriptwriter/director Denis Villeneuve based on Lebanese-born Wajdi Mouawad's play Scorched.

This is one of those movies where it is obligatory that whoever writes about it does not reveal too much of the content.

Briefly, the film is about a woman’s fate in a war-torn country called Fuad (Lebanon) where Christians and Muslims kill each other in a tit for tat cycle of violence. The woman, Nawal Marwan (portrayed by Belgian Lubna Azabal), is Christian, persecuted by the Muslims, who goes through an ordeal, moves to Canada and dies. With her last will, she surprises her teenage twins, sister and brother, and sends them on a mission to Fuad in search for their father and brother.

Due to minor problems of some dates of things within the narrative (perhaps those could've been clarified either by dialogue or texts), the movie-goer will have to be extremely vigilant from the very beginning till the end, and perhaps an appearance of some of the characters is a bit confusing at the end, which tries the watcher's 'willing suspense of disbelieve' close to the limit, this is really a great, enjoyable movie that holds its grip throughout. Highly recommended.

Lord of the Rings fans

Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of Bad Dress-Sense and Cure for Insomniacs

Entirely without proof and purely through the unkindness of heart, I suspect there are two kinds of Lord of the Rings fans: those who only fall asleep while reading the books and those who also do it while watching the movies.

I tend to fall towards the latter with considerable fervour. Although, although...

Something somewhere inside my weather-toughened torso sometimes kindles and glows tenderly and makes me love the sagas nonetheless.