Last night we screened The Illusionist and The Prestige back to back at 3QF. (I've seen Prestige before but not the other one, and we had a variety of similar combinations in the crowd on the couch.) Of all our movie matchups at 3QF this seemed the most obvious and uninteresting yet it drew the largest crowd. Funny that. Anyways it was pretty much no contest; I thought The Illusionist was pretty terrible, digital intermediate and Paul Giamatti notwithstanding. I spent most of it waiting for The Prestige to start. Which itself is, of course, a whole other movie once you know the secret... and still so fucking good. There's that line in the flick where Batman tells the kid that you should never reveal the secret of the trick because as soon as you do they won't be interested in you any more, but I dunno, I was still pretty spectacularly interested in watching the way Nolan manipulates the language of cinema to misdirect and redirect and generally smoke out the series of assumptions he's going to need to you to have in order for the climax to work. After the film was over we had a rollicking conversation about it and about Batman and Wolverine and Bizarro Wolverine and Alfred/Alfie/Michael Caine and the guy with the jowls. And also about whether old people should be videotaped all the time, which admittedly has very little to do with magic.

Sort of irritated that the Prestige score is not available in iTunes or, apparently, in Canada. I'm tired of ordering stuff online. In the plus column though I've pretty much paid off my credit cards at last, including Molly the Macbook. So I guess a $12 CD isn't too much to worry about.

Hey speaking of 3QF, The Girls (downstairs) smoke a lot of pot. During the movies last night it kept wafting up through the vents like we were in some opium den in the 1890s, which fit the mood of both flicks rather precisely. Beats the fuck out of the incense anyway.

Still waiting on shaving the beard.

Wuh oh: the buncha guys from Spart look to be dominating. It's going to be one of those weekends...

Today is Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV show)'s tenth anniversary. Fancy that!