http://www.aliceintexas.com/rabbithole alice in cultureland Tue, 27 Mar 2007 19:39:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en wikipedia page Excellent read, morally obligatory. Points of interest: 1. The recent publication date, due to the absence of mnoral-nationalistic simplification. Not only can a Nazi officer be capable of saving the lives of the oppressed, there are good and bad people on all sides, which (obviously) doesn't mean they exist in ... http://www.aliceintexas.com/rabbithole/?p=257 Yes, very decent book readable and quite interesting. If I was looking for the other side of the story to Joan Didion's then I was disappointed, she barely figures here except as part of "us", the screenwriter partnership Dunne tells his tale about. By the end of the book my ... http://www.aliceintexas.com/rabbithole/?p=256 From this interview: Maria Delgado: [to PA]: When Bad Education came out, you spoke about women inspiring you to write comedy and men to write tragedy. Do you still think that's the case?Pedro Almodóvar: Yes, I'm conscious of that. I don't know why - maybe that should be a question from ... http://www.aliceintexas.com/rabbithole/?p=255 imdb This film starts with a massacre at a wedding and gets progressively more violent from there. It's meant to be hilariously funny, but I got completely stuck on the blood etc and failed to laugh much. Maybe some other time. Even I could tell it had a lot of clever ... http://www.aliceintexas.com/rabbithole/?p=253 link This is a slice of life film about Kurdish children on the Iraq/ Turkey border before and during the latest Gulf war. The children are mostly orphans, surviving by collecting and selling landmines, quite a few of them are missing limbs and the main story revolves around a young girl ... http://www.aliceintexas.com/rabbithole/?p=252 This is a very very brilliantly written book, terribly sad of course and full of penetrating insights worth hanging onto. I did have to read most of it twice, though, her style is so careful and rather dense, and the occasional sections she quotes from novels make me think they ... http://www.aliceintexas.com/rabbithole/?p=250 Minerva just read a Russian book, and I like her summary of the off-putting side of Russian novels: navel gazing in extremis and having to master all those names and patronymics. Add to that the sheer length of some of these books, and there in a nutshell is why I ... http://www.aliceintexas.com/rabbithole/?p=249 I found this Salon article about Satin Rouge annoying and superficial. The film is Tunisian, about a dowdy widow who finds new expression and passion for life through belly dancing, an unrespectable activity she hides from her daughter and neighbours. One cannot attempt to understand a film like this by peering ... http://www.aliceintexas.com/rabbithole/?p=247 imdb entry Another Almodovar film. Patterns are starting to emerge. First of all, although Almodovar famously makes films about women, even where there are no men at all, those men who are mentioned totally dictate the stories of the lives of the women. For instance, by being corpses, or from having disappeared. Secondly, ... http://www.aliceintexas.com/rabbithole/?p=246 Great film, Almodovar is definitely one of my favourite geniuses. I was slightly disappointed at the relative lack of hysterial humour and high-power-energy that this film has compared to the only other one I've seen so far, but am reserving judgement on that until having seen a few more. (It is ... http://www.aliceintexas.com/rabbithole/?p=245