blockbusters!

It's been a movie-watching kind of a week. Phet and I took turns going to see Batman on the weekend (we go at different times so that one of us always is at home with Ji...we still don't have access to reliable pharmaceuticals that would knock him out long enough for us to leave him here, and if we didn't drug him, he'd have our apartment outfitted with sonic bombs and radar missles by the time we got back). After we see the show we hang out in the evening and compare notes, so it is kind of social. Demented and sad, but social.

Our consensus on Batman: good; true to the darker Frank Miller Dark Knight series; didn't like Christian Bale's unmoving upper lip. Phet hypothesizes that Bale has bad teeth. Anyone with documentary evidence is invited to submit it to me. Thanks.

We also saw Mr & Mrs Smith. Phet went, and told me to wait for the DVD. But since nothing else was playing other than House of Wax, a Japanese horror movie about an evil killer whose killings are predicated by evil cell phone calls, and a Thai horror movies (they have promo cardboard cut outs with girls stringing hooks through a guy, and the hooks are connected with real string, and the cardboard figures are attached to a motor so that they swing slowly back and forth, and the strings and hooks move through the guy, who is -incidentally- all bloody), I went to see Mr & Mrs Smith.

I find it hard to watch anyone else in movies if Angelina Jolie is onscreen. She is just SO incredibly beautiful. But my final word on the film is: goddamn I wish the school was extending my holidays by 3 weeks and not just 1 because then I would for SURE AS HELL go to the film festival and get my annual fill of artsily crafted psychodramas and stories that are not about Americans.

Right now we're in the middle of watching Alexander on DVD. We don't have a TV, so our DVD player is quietly fossilizing in the cupboard and we watch everything on Phet's souped-up new laptop. So far my critical summary of Alexander is: Colin Farrell's eyebrows and accent SUCK. And my addendum is: Angelina Jolie is riveting for her beauty and her RIDICULOUS Russian mamma accent. Ji is captivated by the guts and gore of it all, although I try to distract him with tickle fights when the soldiers are getting skewered or beheaded or otherwise butchered. Ji's violent vocabulary expands daily. Last week he told Phet that if Phet bugged him he would (and I quote) beat him with a gorilla.

Time to go back to Pingu, man. [Bangkok-23-June-2005]