Slighty Ill Babble

If this is a flu, it's the mildest case I've ever had. The headache is gone this morning, and my face has that fuzziness usually associated with horrible congestion. Your Sister leapt into spouse-nurse mode and fixed me up with tomato soup and popcorn (try it). I took some vitamin cocktails and Vitamin C pills and ginger ale. DayQuil and NyQuil were employed. The sick bed was used. I know I slept heavy because I woke up in the same position I had laid down. For lunch yesterday, I bought bananas and wolfed them down. I think I'll be OK by the weekend. I wonder if my running hiatus helped this sneak in. I haven't run since the Halloween race.

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We watched half of a Russian vampire movie called Night Watch. It's disjointed in a way that suggests aggressive editing. Or it might be a Russian sensibility. It's stylish in what many used to call the "MTV style" back when MTV showed jump-cut videos. Now it's more likely to be called "video-game style" as it looks like the animated narrative scenes between playable parts of games.

This director went to to make Wanted last year, and I liked that film's energy. That guy and the one who made District 9 this year have enjoyed big-studio success. Combine them with Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) and Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth), and big-action films are no longer the territory of domestic film students. The action movie is truly going global.

Technically, it's going global again. John Woo was the master of low-budget Hong Kong action films, but his American productions are scattershot. China and Japan have cranked out some nice genre films in the past 20 years, mostly period films with samurai and wire-fu, and thank God for them because they indirectly gave us The Matrix. The director of those films, the Wachowskis, are clearly American kids who are influenced by movies from beyond our coasts, and that's why their films (V for Vendetta, Bound, Speed Racer) are distinctive and exciting. They have a new movie coming out this holiday season called Ninja Assassin. Looks dumb as rocks, but fun dumb.

Picture of the Day
From Big Picture: Miranda Galan (center) was one of 80 third grade children from the North School that made a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston on a field trip from New Hampshire on October 30th, 2009. In the spirit of Halloween students got a surprise gift from MFA director Malcolm Rogers and Bob Gallery, Massachusetts President of Bank of America when they handed out Egyptian masks and toured the "Secrets of Tomb 10A" exhibit.