Three movies with D-Coc this morning: Mother/Senator/Nun, the political thriller from Belgium; The Tree, about the renegade Eastern Orthodox holy man living alone in the Lithuanian wilderness just after World War II; and Habituelle, the one with the bears. All good, though D-Coc found the dialectic presented in The Tree to be troubling from a sociopolitical standpoint. (I just thought the girl was hot.)

Meanwhile, Matty Price and I just moved our yurts clean out of sight of one another due to an argument over the announced title for Indy IV, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I say it's a worse title than The Phantom Menace, and he says The Phantom Menace is still significantly more awful than this. It became heated; there was shouting. So really, I don't want to see that pinhead's yurt at all right now.

Points against Indy IV: 4
Points for Indy IV: 4

Cycling through more news, I haven't been able to get "Love will tear us apart" out of my head since Friday night. Only, it's just the chorus. So it's like when my sister sings something - and endless repetition of the most defining line from the song, over and over and over again. In my head. All the time. It's not fun.

So let's dispense some more wisdom: rule numero dos is, as coined by MP, "if it's not working, walk the fuck out." People think I'm crazy for walking out of these movies but you gotta understand, when you're on the twentieth or thirtieth throw at the table, it's not worth your emotional energy to dedicate time to something that doesn't "have it" - which is usually readily apparent within the first fifteen minutes. And yet, I have not walked out on anything yet this year, although I suppose in more fatigued times I would have walked out of The World Unseen and Chrysalis. They weren't bad, but they didn't "have it."

Re Chrysalis, I have two moratoria:

1. I would like to declare a moratorium on this plot. The one where it's about 50 or 60 years in the future, some organization (either an extremely powerful corporation or a government agency) has invented some thing with enormously dangerous repercussions. And those repercussions have filtered down to the streets, usually because they're using prostitutes or street children or something as lab rats. And there's one rogue cop who is going to put the pieces together and bring the big organization down. It's not that it's a bad plot, it's just that I've seen it enough. Last year with Renaissance, five years ago with Minority Report, hell there's bits of it in Blade Runner and a bunch of other places too. I am calling it fait accompli. We have done this thing: let us move on to another thing.

2. I blame Francis Coppola for this one: use of desaturated colour in the future. Moratorium that shit. I blame Francis because it's his fault that period movies are all burnished and golden, and some nutter then extended the logic of that and decided that a) our inherent "humanity" is represented by degrees of colour saturation, and therefore b) the future will be cold, desaturated, and washed out. (This also creates a linear timeline in which the present - "now" - is apparently some kind of median grade of our colourful humanness; we are neither as ochre-human as we were before, nor as blue-inhuman as we are bound to become.) Plus the whole damn thing just looks like a Brita commercial. Let's just throw the lingoistic jive clean out the winda, and go find new tools.

Just got out of Elizabeth: The Golden Age, pretty much the only really "Hollywood" ticket I actively pursued this time around, to indulge in the opulence of seeing that almost ludicrously opulent movie in the equally ludicrously opulent Elgin in the middle of a Monday afternoon when we really oughta all be at work and not watching movies about virgin queens kicking Spanish naval ass. Oh how I love that shit. And it is shit: these flicks are the cinematic equivalent of pulp like The Godfather (the novel). But I ate it up, because it was pretty and grave and Cate Blanchett is amazing. And at the end of the day, it's nice to have it reaffirmed that it's just really freakin' challenging to find a spouse, and a co-monarch especially. Fortunately, I've come to an important decision. I need no queen.