I’m sure there are worse things in the world than picking up a cup of iced tea, taking a huge draught and discovering that it’s sweetened. I’m quite sure of that, in fact. But at the moment I’d be hard pressed to come up with an example. Ugh. Sweet tea—that’s just plain nasty.
Shame seemed to be the theme of this week’s episode of Mad Men. Betty Draper was ashamed of what the neighbors might think if they found out what Sally was doing during a sleepover (and doing to to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., no less!). Bert Cooper finally got to make use of his Japan-o-philism when the agency hosted a group from Honda, but his strongest contribution was to express shame over Roger’s behavior. And Don made use of the culture of shame by goading his rival into breaking the rules of a bake-off for Honda’s business (thus causing them to over-invest in the project) and then expressing indignation to Honda’s executives because they broke their own rules. My favorite part of the episode was Don’s deception. It was like a caper movie, where he pretended to be spending a boatload of money on an ad, thereby inducing another firm to up the ante. It was very much in line with the Business is War philosophy.
We watched Cairo Time on the weekend. It stars Patricia Clarkson as Juliette, the wife of a Canadian United Nations employee stationed in the Middle East. She’s a magazine editor taking a break to go visit her husband, except he’s been delayed in Gaza, where he helps establish refugee camps, by an uprising. She’s a fish out of water, and her hero is a Syrian, Tariq, who used to work with her husband, played by Alexander Siddig. He looked very familiar to me, and it took me a while to recognize him as Dr. Bashir from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Tariq becomes her tour guide through this beautiful landscape, explaining the local customs to her while trying to navigate a dangerous path between chaperone and something more. Juliette promised to wait to visit the pyramids until her arrives, but delay begets delay and a trip to the pyramids is just one more step toward overstepping bounds. It’s a beautifully sensual movie, written and directed by a Syrian-Canadian filmmaker. I’ve always wanted to go to Egypt and the movie enhanced that desire. My favorite line comes from Tariq after Juliette says she wants to see Alexandria: “You know the library burned down.”
It turns out my wife has never seen The Lord of the Rings, so we watched The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers this weekend. The super-long extended versions of both. I found myself marveling at the use of forced perspective throughout. I maintain that the scene where Galadrial goes nuclear when Frodo innocently tempts her with the ring, is the worst part of all three movies. It’s like someone else got in there and decided to tinker with that one bit, it’s so much out of line with everything else. Otherwise I like it as much as ever, and look forward to seeing the final installment, perhaps next weekend, 35 false endings and all. I think Jackson’s crowning achievement is in his treatment of Gollum. Not so much the animation but his understanding of the character as tragic rather than evil. The scenes where Gollum struggles with himself are great.
I’m almost finished Dexter By Design and ready to take up the new Martin Cruz Smith novel. The Dexter book is okay. I like the fact that the nemesis is essentially off-screen for most of the book. He’s briefly glimpsed while stabbing someone important, and observed fleeing from the scene of a hit and run, but other than that he’s in the book mostly by implication. Still an example, in my opinion, of a case where the TV adapters did a better job than the original.
