Hidden

I watched two movies this weekend. They were possibly as different as you could imagine, but I enjoyed them both. The first one was well-reviewed, the second panned. What can I say? I’m easily entertained.

The first is Caché, a French film directed by an Austrian. It stars two of our favorite European actors, Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. They play a couple who is being stalked. He’s a popular public television host; she’s a book editor. Someone is sending them videotapes showing—at first—hours of footage of their home. The videos become more threatening when they come accompanied by childish sketches of people with their necks slashed, or when the footage is of the husband’s family home. The movie is, in part, about suppressed/repressed guilt about childhood transgressions, but the director leaves many things open for the viewer to decide. He never reveals who recorded or sent the videos. He doesn’t close the door on the couple’s son’s suspicions. And, in the final scene, which is confusing and disorienting (primarily because the credits start to roll when you least expect it), the director opens a new avenue of suspicion, but he hides it in plain sight. You have to pay particularly close attention to something going on in the corner of the frame in a wide shot.

The movie has two stunning scenes. The first is the literal depiction of a chicken with its head cut off. A rooster, actually, but it’s astonishing. I’d always heard about how they behave after being beheaded, but this was the first time I’d actually seen it. The second stunning scene I won’t reveal, but it comes as such a surprise that I think I sad a bad word out loud when it happened.

We watched the interview with the director afterward, and I’m so glad we did. His spoken French is very fluent, but I gradually realized that he wasn’t a native French speaker. Mostly from the way he ordered his sentences, placing adjectives before nouns instead of after them. I only discovered later that he was Austrian. He is very eloquent and revealing about what he was attempting to accomplish with the movie and it pointed out some things I had overlooked or hadn’t appreciated.

The second movie was 16 Blocks with Bruce Willis, Mos Def and David Morse. I was expecting a Yippie-Ki-Ay-(Samuel Jackson word) film, but it wasn’t that, exactly. Mos Def was a trip, reminiscent of the Orlando Jones character in The Fifth Element. You could spend the whole movie just listening to his non-stop ramble. Willis is great as a run-down, alcoholic cop who hasn’t lost all of his sharpness. The shoot-em-up scenes are a little much (it’s amazing how few people are actually wounded throughout), but I’m a sucker for a warm fuzzy ending. Didn’t watch the alternate ending on the disk, but from what I’ve read about it, I’m just as glad.

I spent a lot of time with Missing Persons this weekend. Saturday was devoted to getting the first 25 pages in order based on feedback from my agent. I did a lot of work moving things around so that certain information is revealed in a particular order. Yesterday I managed to re-edit the next 150 pages. I have less than 100 pages to read through on this pass, which I hope to do in the next two or three days. Another 1500 words have gone by the wayside and the manuscript is down to a mean, lean 280 pages/88,500 words.

re Big Brother: I think the results of last night’s HoH competition mean that Mike Boogie will never get to use the awesome power he was awarded. As I recall the rules, he only had three chances to use it, and he’s passed twice and now that he’s HoH it’s moot. The writing could be on the wall for Janelle, though, unless she pulls off another PoV win. The show won’t be nearly as interesting without her around, though it might be fun to see how the remaining “alliance” implodes. Penalty points to Howie for his poor showing after being evicted. He displayed really bad behavior in season six, but had held himself together pretty well this season, until then.