Resistance Is Futile

Picked up a plastic doo-dad from the pharmacy yesterday. It's just a plastic tube that goes with an inhaler, makes it easier to get a full dose of medicine or something. Whatever. It's just a piece of plastic, no drugs on any kind. Still, the pharmacy would not sell it to me without a prescription, probably because it's a "medical device", and insurance won't pay for it unless a doctor specifically orders it, and because of all this administrative overhead what should cost a dollar ends up costing the insurance company a zillion bucks.

Came with a roadmap size sheet of instructions printed in 14 languages. I think that has to be a new record. I don't even recognize half of them. It was made by Philips, the Dutch conglomerate that I really dislike because sometimes their "corporate group think" seems to overshadow common sense. Now here they are, trying to make sure they are not discriminating against anyone, or are they just trying to assimilate everyone, like the Borg?

Inspector Bellamy

Oh, goodie! A French murder mystery! This ought to be fun. Well, I don't know about fun, but it was entertaining, but now that's over I am not sure why. I mean nothing happens. We go through a bunch of motions, and some weird stuff happens, but we know exactly as much about the "murder" at the end as we did at the beginning. I think what saved this movie was the editing. It could easily have had lots of drawn out scenes with lots of dialog and long lingering shots of this, that and the other, but they didn't. They cut the scenes short, sometimes almost too short. You think the scene is going to run on for a bit so they can tell you something, but they don't. They have already told you the important stuff, no need to repeat it or embroider it.

The basic plot is one we've seen before: married guy falls in love with his girlfriend and then stages his death to collect on his life insurance. He even goes to the trouble to get plastic surgery and a fake ID. Except the insurance money is for the wife he is leaving. The plot unravels before we are even on the scene. The cops have figured out that the guy who died in the fiery car crash wasn't the owner of the car. Modern forensics, you know. Actually it was fairly primitive forensics. The guy's jaw bone didn't match his dental X-rays.

The plastic surgery was pointless, the guy was obviously the same guy, he just shaved his beard off, and the fake ID must have been really cheap because the Inspector spotted it right away. I got to thinking about this later. Fake documents are a staple of crime stories, but they are usually very expensive and "impossible to tell from the real thing", but it occurred to me that for run of the mill kind of security checks, cheap ID's might work just fine, you know, kind of like the press passes you show to the security guards. If you are dealing with someone who doesn't look at too many ID's, or someone who has already seen a thousand of them this morning, your cheap fake may just work.

Inspector Bellamy (Gérard Depardieu, again!), on vacation at his wife's family home in Nimes, get's pulled in by the mastermind behind this plot. He (the mastermind) is confused, upset, distraught? Hard to tell, in any case he's basically incoherent. Inspector Bellamy is intrigued and proceeds to tease the story out of this guy, and the various women involved: the wife, the girlfriend, and the dead guy's ex-girlfriend (picture).

Funny thing about movies. We'll accept fat guys on the screen, but not fat women. All four of the women in this movie are thin as rails. Gérard is fat. He's always been a big guy, but from 2001 (Vidocq) to 2009 (this movie) he has ballooned to the size of a whale. One scene with his wife lying on top of him on the bed (clothed) emphasizes his whale-like quality. Another thing about Gérard that I don't get is women being attracted to him, but then maybe women see something different. I noticed this in another movie of his: Vatel.

There are all kinds of little stories going on inside this movie. Gérard's user half-brother is one of the bigger ones. The guy is just a disaster, but what are you going to do? He's family. Then there's the dead guy's story, and how he ended up dead, which is curious because we only have the mastermind's word for what happened. The defense mounted by the kid lawyer at the end is amusing. All in all, very entertaining.

Dark Portals: The Chronicles of Vidocq

In French with subtitles, stars Gérard Depardieu as the famous detective Vidocq pursuing the evil Alchemist in 1830 Paris. From The Vidocq Society:

Vidocq's life story is amazing. As a fugitive from French justice, he first offered his services as a police spy and informer. Later, he became so successful at catching criminals that he was named the first chief of the Sûreté, in 1811. Vidocq eventually directed a force of 28 detectives, all of whom were also former criminals.

The story is curious and a bit of a fantasy, but it is totally overshadowed by the visuals, which are stunning. The colors are amazing. Reminds me a bit of Moulin Rouge.

Bit of trivia from IMDB: First feature film shot with the new Sony digital 1080p 24 fps cameras to reach the screen. This was in 2001.

4 Books that didn't make the cut

I picked up four books from the bargain bin the other day, and they all turned out to be turkeys. I only got a couple of chapters into each one before I gave up on them.

• A Spot Of Bother by Mark Haddon. Slow moving story of family life told from the point of view of an old man suffering from anxiety, among other problems. National Bestseller. Did I say slow moving? Make that glacial.
• A Very Private Gentleman by Martin Booth. The blurb on the back makes it sound like it might be an interesting story, and it might be, eventually, but it takes way too long to start going somewhere. The background is just endless.
• Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. It might be a pretty good story, but I'll never know. It's written in some kind of phonetically spelled slang/dialect. It was an effort to figure out what each sentence meant. Some of them were easy enough, but some of the "words" were totally opaque. Too much work to translate.
• Tour de Force by Philip Cleife, A Harper Novel of Suspense. It could have been a good story, except for the implausible behavior of the lead characters. Most of it is pretty good, but then something happens, or someone says something, and I just throw up my hands in disgust. Once or twice would be okay, but it kept happening over and over again. 

Outrage

Japanese gangster (Yakuza) film, with subtitles, not be confused with Outrage, the film about closeted politicians. At the beginning I think, okay, we have some double dealing going on, but as things progress I realize that every time any of these guys make some kind of agreement, the very next thing they do is make some kind of double-cross arrangement with somebody else. After a while I got tired of trying to keep track of who is on who's side. Not that it makes any difference. Eventually the situation reaches the boiling point and then the bullets start flying and the bodies start falling, and any alliances that you thought were stable, turns out they aren't. What a crummy way to live your life. And what a waste of several acres of tattooing.

2nd Grade Claim to Fame

I was talking over Optimize Me!'s bio-feedback scheme with my wife today, and she implies that they would remember me from my earlier visit. I expressed doubt, and she disagreed. She was sure they would remember me because they had run out of math problems for me to do.

During the evaluation at Optimize Me! they had me alternately relaxing and then performing simple mental exercises. One of these exercises is to perform a series of simple mental arithmetic problems: two times three, four plus five, that sort of thing. Afterwards they told me that they have a script they follow, and I did all the math problems so quickly that they ran out of problems and had to start making them up on the fly.

When I was in second grade (at Lafayette Elementary School in West Seattle back in 1958), our teacher used to play records of simple math problems for us. I was so good at it that one day she turned the record player up to top speed just to see if I could do the problems that fast. I think she told the rest of the class not to bother trying, they were just going to see whether I could do it or not. Not only was I able to answer all the problems, I got them all right. Yay! I was a second grade math prodigy, high point of my career in math..

Uplifters

A blast from the past that could have been written today, except nobody writes that well anymore, and there are a few slang terms that I wasn't familiar with. All in all a pretty good explanation of what's ever been wrong with America.

Via View From The Porch.