2022-11-13 16:21
Rewatched the Irma Vep mini-series this week and enjoyed it a lot more the second time through. Maybe I was just paying attention more, or maybe watching in closer succession made it easier to draw the connections between the episodes. Perhaps it is better as a 6 hours movie than an 8 episode series. Alicia Vikander is really great in it, she does a lot of heavy lifting in the show and is continually showing off different aspects of her characters, besides having to play an actor acting and sometimes a different actor acting. Assayas seems to put a lot of his thoughts about movies and art into it, it's hard not to see the director character as some kind of analog, he has, after all, previous made an Irma Vep movie with a Chinese actress that he later married and divorced. There's some irony to the way many of the characters make critical comments about superhero blockbusters, but then Mira (Vikander's character) kind of becomes a superhero (of a sort) by putting on the Irma Vep cat suit and being inhabited by the "spirit" of the character. That is such a superhero origin story. Part Miss Fury, part... one of those occult DC heroes.
Construction starts tomorrow, and I have been perhaps successful in setting up a makeshift shower in our basement. We had a utility sink installed to which I attached a long shower hose/head, there's a dog pool, and shower curtains hanging from the ceiling. The sketchiest part is the water transfer pump which does not do as good a job as I would like draining the pool of water. Can we manage for a few weeks that way? We'll see. Can I manage locked up in my office with Buddy all day while the contractors are here? We'll see.
Took a walk early this morning around the block... I got more than three quarters around before I saw a single person or moving car, once I noticed it started feeling like some kind of alternate reality, or a post-apocalyptic video game or something, as if I were just strolling through an abandoned town, I was actually getting a little creeped out about it.
Been reading Bolano's 2666 but am getting tired of the long section that has an excess of description of women being murdered in Santa Teresa, Mexico. I just... can't keep reading that. I started skimming looking for the sections that follow some ongoing characters, though I'm still not sure where that is going. I'm curious about the last section of the book, as it seems to return back to the subject of the first part, but I'm still not sure how it all fits together with the other sections.