Peter Sellers was a very funny person, but he was also deeply disturbed and, this movie suggests, refused to become a responsible adult all through his life. This movie is often hilarious, incredibly well acted, especially on the part of Geoffrey Rush, who is as amazing and chameleonlike as Sellers himself used to be, but unfortunately lacks coherence. More a collection of individual snippets than a single story arc, the plot leaves out a lot, and the frequent breaks in the narrative, with Rush taking on the roles of people important in his life, walking literally off the stage of the scenes, while an ingenious device, add confusion to an already meandering tale. Still, very impressive and entertaining.

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The caveat first: this is not exactly a book written for a general audience. It is a treatise of ethical philosophy, and the reasoning and phrasing is, I felt, even denses in some places than reverence to the esteemed traditions of academic discourse, let alone the subject matter, should have had it be (Though not having tried to set a thorough study of the intricacies of a system of moral acting in popular prose, I of course might be entirely mistaken and this book the closest anyone can get to simplicity in what is without a doubt an discomfortingly complex matter).

Cavalieri sets out to evaluate what entities are moral entities, in the sense that they figure into moral considerations of the actions of moral agents. A thorough review of opinions of the past reveals that none of them can be made consistent. Cavalieri then suggests that the best possible solution for our current state of knowledge of the cognitive life of other species is to extend the notion of human rights to all mammals and birds. Unfortunately, her case is solid, so this is the rare case of a book that has the potential to change my life. No more burgers. Poor me.

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Most of what this movie reveals about the criminal mastermind Kissinger was already known to me, and while the detached way the material was presented made the movie seem much more objective and unassailable as any movie ever could be, it also produced a feeling of heavy handed redundancy. I think if my choices are polemic hilarity, as in Moore’s borderline scenes in Bowling for Columbine, and serene factuality, I’ll take the raving fat man any time. The most interesting suggestion came at the very end, when either the author of the book this movie is based on, or the films director, suggested that the reason the US hadn’t joined the international court yet was that they were very afraid of public scrutiny of Kissinger’s files. It almost makes too much sense.

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As usual with obscure stuff on our Netflix list, I forget where I came across this or why I ordered it. A quick IMDB and google search reveals that Argento, and this movie in particular, have a devoted fanbase who consider him a visual genius and Suspiria the paragon of horror movies. I beg to differ. While the design is original, and it’s always a delight to see Escher’s art, even if it’s misplaced, the plot, acting, effects and direction suck just too badly to be bearable. The attack of the rubber bat is a comic highlight, in an otherwise overly long C movie, and the tagline “the only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92” is awkwardly fitting.

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I was unable to find any image of the cover of this book online – which tells you something about it’s age. The Social Brain came out in the 80s, and it proposed, based in Gazzaniga’s own groundbreaking research on split brain patients, that the brain was a combined structure of separate and somewhat independent modules, and that the unfied mental life we seem to have is a constructed illusion rather than a controlling entity. The descriptions of the experiments are as amazing today as they must have been when they were first done, the speculative general part seems to vague to be either true or false, and the final chapter, in which Gazzaniga reverently interviews himself, instead of just saying what he wants to say, for no good reason, is slightly embarrasing.

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I have wanted to see this ever since I saw the trailers on HBO when it first came out, firstly because the subject seemed interesting (the invention of heart surgery combined with the story of racial discrimination in the medical establishment), and because Alan Rickman plays one of the main characters. Those were good enough reasons, but as it turns out, Mos Def almost steals the show playing the other lead. The whole way of story delivery is a smidge on the sentimental side, but not enough to spoil a touching historical tale.

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This is a profoundly silly book, about magic symbols and masonic references on the US 1$ bill. Some of them are surprising and interesting (like the etymology of Dollar, the significance of the pyramid, or the source for the $ symbol), but most of the letter and word counting and geometric analysis of what appears where seems more like an unhealthy obsession than an informative analysis. I know Gematria is very honorable quackery, but it obviously is possible to overdo it. Who would have thunk?

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I have to admit to being reluctant to go see this, mainly because I thought it would, beyond the taboo breaking gimmick which seemed to have catapulted the two cowboys into the center of the cultural universe, be an inconsequential and boring love story. Now I feel reluctant to point out how wrong I was, because I’m sure you must’ve heard by now that this is a touchingly real story about failed lifes, magnificently filmed in a beautiful setting.

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In this sequel to Hyperion, we learn a lot more about what the Shrike is, who built the Time Tombs and why, and what the enigmatic events in the first book meant. In a way, these revelations destroy the sense of mystery that surrounded the time tombs and the Shrike. The necessity to keep a plotline that goes back and forth in time from folding unto itself and creating a know makes this book hard to follow in places, and gives a feeling of contrivance to what seemed a monumentally powerful force. The explanations, on the other hand, work well enough, and the overarching theme of death, suffering and how organic life can keep its dignity in the face of them and strive to be free of them without destroying everything in the process is fascinating to follow. The combination with Keats’ romantic poetry, while adding a very unusual touch to this space opera, doesn’t work all that well for me, but that might mainly be because I’m not too smitten with romantic literature and find the hyperbole and godlyness of subject matter and language tiring.

I am sufficiently interested in Simmons vision to someday go on to read Endymion and Rise of Endymion, the next two installments in the Hyperion saga, but not very soon. I’m too afraid to find religious mayhem similar to what happened in Herbert’s progressively less accessible Dune series.

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This could have been a marvelous homage to martial arts movies in general and the Zatoichi series in particular, full of references to details of Japanese culture, and funny little scenes. But unfortunately the plot, which should have been a simple story of evil oppression and the lone swordsman who breaks it, is told in such a fragmented and oblique style, that it gets into the way, rather than providing the frame upon which all the fine details are hung. It’s too bad, there is so much to love in here, but it all just doesn’t come together.

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