Last week was pretty busy. On Tuesday I joined a Movie Meetup and saw the James Bond movie The Man With the Golden Gun (for the second time, but first time on the big screen). The last one directed by Guy Hamilton, it's one of the series' less successful entries, though it does have Christopher Lee as the villain. My favourite part was the two Thai schoolgirls taking on a whole karate school (and wiping the floor with them, of course).
On Wednesday I went to Eton House near Pape station and saw Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (for the second time) on a big video screen with the Life Begins at 40 Meetup. It started the whole trend of '50s scoff movies, but as the title suggests it's a bit preachy and self-important in a way characteristic of the time. (The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit had the ad line "A movie that may very well be the very greatest!" You wish...) The Sam Jaffe character is clearly based on Albert Einstein.
On Thursday I went to another of Betty Anne's art walks. I met a senior woman with wide round glasses like Iris Apfel, and Betty Anne said she's the Iris Apfel of Toronto!
I just finished translating the Portuguese children's book whose title translates as The Wolf Who Wanted a Sweetheart. (The author and illustrator are French, so I assume that was the original language.) It's about a wolf who's looking for love and learns to dress fancy and carry flowers and memorize love poems. After getting nowhere, he sits down in the road to take off his painful cowboy boots, and a she-wolf runs into him and he finds love after all. The lesson for boys: Sit down on the sidewalk and hope a girl runs into you!
I'm almost up to the Battle of Waterloo in Vanity Fair. (I've started reading Lapham's Quarterly at lunchtime.)
No comments:
Post a Comment