CXVII: Cinema in Flight

It's another one of those days where I had a great topic to write about but failed to write it down in my planner at the moment of inspiration and now I'm here with no recollection of what it was. Argh.

So instead I will rant about the great letdown that is the movie Nine. It was so bad that I fell asleep during it on my flight home from NYC. And I usually have trouble falling asleep on planes nowadays.

The music was not catchy as Chicago's, the story wasn't riveting, and the characters did not mesmerize me. I am so glad I didn't pay to watch it in theatres. Why does Hollywood keep making expensive and crappy movies?

A film I would highly recommend is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It is a French film based on the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of Elle Magazine, and his experiences with locked-in syndrome after suffering a stroke. He is mentally conscious but totally paralyzed and unable to talk; however, through the tireless efforts of hospital staff and a transcriber, he is able to write a memoir using a time-consuming system in which the transcriber repeats a frequency-ordered alphabet (an alphabet whose order is based on the most commonly used letters in the language). Jean-Do would blink one of his eyes when the letter he wanted was recited -- so you can imagine how long it would take to write a sentence, let alone a whole book!

Movies like this don't come along very often, but when I see something new, unique, and resonant, it refreshes my confidence in the film industry.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is supposed to be an excellent movie. I have yet to read the critically-acclaimed novel by Stieg Larsson though it has been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of months. I'm still finishing up Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw.