DUNE

Last Thursday I saw Denis Villeneuve's movie of (the first half of) Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic Dune with my friend John P. at the Scotiabank in 3-D.  It's the first time I went to the movies since Little Women over 18 months ago, and  we were the only two people in the theatre!  It was pretty spellbinding, a worthy adaptation of an epic novel I've read twice.

On Friday my watch party showed Ron Howard's 1930s boxing movie Cinderella Man, which I'd never seen before.  Half an hour before the end, just before the climactic fight, there was some glitch in the Google Play software and I had to turn off my computer and start everything again!  When I finally got back to my Zoom group, I wanted to show the rest of the movie but I couldn't enable the share feature, so I had to see the rest by myself. (The role of hosted had defaulted to someone else, I later figured out, and she was the one who had to enable it for me.) We might have had a very interesting discussion after the movie's end...

Our next History Discussion Group topic is the Philippines, so I'm now reading Luis H. Francia's A History of the Philippines:  From Indios Bravos to Filipinos.  I noticed that the war the Americans fought against Filipino guerrillas around 1900 was the same time as the British counter-insurgency of the Boer War.  It also occurred to me that in recent years there have been parallels between the Philippines and Brazil:  both emerged from dictatorship in the mid-1980s, and both are now dealing with a government with fascist tendencies.

I started the second season of The Handmaid's Tale, but I don't think I'll continue with it.  It's just too disturbing for me... (Moira's watching Succession, but rich people don't really interest me.)

I don't think I've mentioned that I didn't get cast in that Anne of Green Gables show.  But I did have a good time doing the audition, and I wish I could find other shows to go out for!