Bleugh in the Fog

Oof. So out of it to-day. Combination of sick and no coffee. Coffee sounded very unappetising this morning so I made tea with two bags. Could not match the might of coffee.

My parents got me a nice big tower of tea they got on a recent trip to Disneyland. It's decorated with an Alice in Wonderland theme--the 1951 Disney movie, the one I prefer. I guess it's in merchandising that Disney finally quietly admits defeat on a movie.

A few months back, I bought this $5.75 collection of 20 Alfred Hitchcock movies after I think I saw Roger Ebert recommend it on his website. It seems to be most of the movies Hitchcock made before 1940 along with a few episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I finally got around to watching The Lady Vanishes, included in the collection, last night.



The image quality leaves a lot to be desired, but I guess you get what you pay for.

Hitchcock seemed a bit more puerile in the 30s. His meet-cute between the leads at first seems to borrow the one from Top Hat--instead of Fred Astaire tap dancing a floor above Ginger Rogers as she tries to sleep, Michael Redgrave has three hotel servants doing a rough, clompy dance while he plays a flute, all this disturbing Margaret Lockwood below. Unlike Top Hat, Lockwood has Redgrave evicted when he failed to cease causing noise after a warning, so he takes revenge by entering her room while she's in bed, threatening to say she invited him in if she complains. Hitchcock's heroes are often a bit naughty with women in compromised positions, but this was the first time I can remember thinking the guy was just a dick. I never warmed up to him, even after the two had an adorable scuffle in a train baggage compartment with a podgy magician. I kind of wish the movie had followed just the gorgeous Lockwood and her two friends we see only at the beginning.



Most of the movie takes place on the train, and film's central idea, the vanishing of a kindly old governess who befriends Lockwood on the train, works extremely well. Lockwood's anxiety is played perfectly against a whole train of people who mysteriously deny having seen the old woman.



It presages somewhat the more psychological elements of Hitchcock's later films as Lockwood begins to think she might be crazy. It creates a subtly frightening power imbalance between her and the condescending male passengers. Then there are all the clues obviously set up before the woman's disappearance--her tea, her name written on the window--that we wait to pay off like a bomb ticking under the table.

Gods of Cold and Flu

I have a cold that seems to mainly consist of a sore throat. I've been attacking it aggressively with honey, tea, and candy canes. Candy canes are certainly cheap after Christmas, which is convenient for those of us who have developed an addiction to them.



I had a cold at precisely this time last year, too. I hope it isn't followed again by a nuclear stomach flu during the first week of school. The only class I'm taking, Japanese II, is also one of the classes I had last year, and it wasn't until the illness invoked stupor wore off that I realised if I had any hope of passing the class I would have to give it my undivided attention. Which is my plan now. And in addition to this, I'm spending an hour every day on Japanese assignments I've been giving myself.

I will do this. I will get through it this time.

This is, I think, the fourth time I've signed up for Japanese II.



In his blog yesterday, Neil Gaiman posted an introduction he wrote to a series of novels and stories called The Viriconium by M. John Harrison. I'd never heard of the series or author, but Gaiman's introduction whetted my appetite.

I was intrigued by the difference in thematic focus he talks about detecting in the books as they proceed. I seem to remember hearing Gaiman talk about or I saw him write about how he felt about his own work, or himself as an author, getting better with age. It's always struck me how, with rock stars, their best work usually happens when they're young while with writers, they're best work usually happens when they're older. I've been inclined to see this as reflective of the inherently Apollonian nature of writing compared to the generally Dionysian nature of rock music.



I read the new Sirenia Digest to-day, in the prolegomenon of which Caitlin invokes the Dionysian/Apollonian dichotomy, for some reason crediting Elizabeth Bear with having come up with it. I think it's most famously associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, but it was an idea that had been around in art criticism for a while already in Nietzsche's day. It basically refers to passion versus craft in art. I believe all art contains some elements of both, but some media tend to drift more into one than the other. It's been a while since I read what Nietzsche wrote about the dichotomy, but I seem to remember him saying musicians (obviously not rock musicians) exemplify the Apollonian form while actors exemplify the Dionysian.

Caitlin may have been referring to an idea that writing about sex is more inherently Dionysian, while writing about Astronomy is more inherently Apollonian. She's discussing Science Fiction, and she lists what she considers a very small number of Science Fiction authors who've written about sex or at least biology. She didn't mention movies, or I'd say she could have certainly included the works of David Cronenberg. Interestingly, though, "Dionysian" isn't what comes to mind when I watch his movies. They seem much more Apollonian, much like H.P. Lovecraft, and, indeed, much like the story in the new Digest, "BLAST THE HUMAN FLOWER".

I haven't read any of Caitlin's newest novels, but her works in the Digest suggest to me a writer who has grown a great deal more Apollonian than the author who wrote Silk and Threshold. Much more like Lovecraft, there's no real character established in "BLAST THE HUMAN FLOWER", it achieves its very effective art through a portrait composed of geological and biological detail.

Honestly, I think by the time one reaches a certain age, it's probably best that you not be in a place where you can be especially Dionysian anymore.

Double Moor

I knew the second episode of this season of Sherlock could never live up to the first. But "The Hounds of Baskerville" would've been bad next to just about anything. Well, I guess it's better than American television seems to be these days.

I'm not normally one to care a lot about plot, but it's not good when less than halfway through a Sherlock Holmes story the end solution is really obvious. One of the great things about Sherlock Holmes is he seems genuinely brilliant. Here he's smarter than most of the people onscreen but still running well behind the average viewer.



It was badly directed, too. This strange deep focus shot of Holmes in conversation with Watson in a pub after an encounter with a hound didn't serve the subject matter and threatened to cause headaches as it seems exactly like having one eye focused differently than the other. I think they probably used two cameras to achieve this, indeed focused differently, but it reminds me of how they used to do process shots to simulate focus deeper than technology allowed--Orson Welles did it effectively in Citizen Kane, but this Sherlock episode reminds me of William Wyler doing it rather awkwardly in The Children's Hour.

Then there was this shot, part of a set of shots used twice during the episode with Watson apparently having been digitally removed the second time;




All this I might forgive if the episode weren't a tired X-Files government experiments plot used to eclipse a classic Holmes story. This was bad.

Twitter Sonnet #342

Juice will seep up from the mass apple grave.
LCDs blankly reflect a tar pit.
Starfleet questions that which Bing Crosby gave.
Mayan iPads were only sixteen bit.
Urgent cheese buttons stink with aged alarm.
Why won't anyone answer twigs like phones?
All edible grass is locked in the barn.
Is it crass to refuse counterfeit loans?
Big warm sweater shipments drift to Pluto.
Sculpted fish crowns distinguish a car lot.
Orange gum compliments a reddened elbow.
Used cars incubate fox tails we forgot.
Orcish taffy congeals into a rock.
Purple rubber jams the galactic clock.

Can We Reach Truth Directly?

I've long felt the only way I could take postmodernism in fiction is in comedy. I've come to enjoy some of Jean-Luc Goddard's films from the 60s, but there are points in his Pierrot Le Fou that I find tedious in the way I normally find postmodernism in drama. The tedium for me arises from the assumption by the artist that reminding us that something's not real will always be interesting. Sooner or later, you get tired of being led down the same path over and over. But I can't find fault with something like this;



The funniest part of this sketch for me is when the shop owner is desperately trying to seem like a different shop owner. It doesn't make sense, but Michael Palin as the shop owner(s) seems so invested in it, it suggests a reality at the same time it implicitly suggests what we're seeing is unreal. So much of humour is based on this.

To-day I watched the first episode of Nisemonogatari, the sequel to Bakemonogatari. Bakemongatari is a portmanteau of the words "bakemono" and "monogatari", meaning "monster" or "ghost" and "story". "Nisemono" means "counterfeit", something that's fake.



The show's always been filled with pop references, but it doesn't settle with them, doesn't assume that referencing something in pop culture is satisfying in itself. They're components of a broader commentary on otaku, or anime and manga fans. It's so refreshing to come across an anime series with such a complex goal when most anime series are consumed with trying to serve audiences with the same stock characters and situations over and over. With its pop culture references, Bakemonogatari and Nisemonogatari are leading us towards its true goal of examining the cultural fetishes otaku obsessively indulge in.



Not unlike Evangelion (a series explicitly referenced in the first episode) did with a more traditional form of storytelling, these shows provide the introspection otaku shy away from. More importantly, instead of the characters and situations in most anime that imply one should be ashamed for most of the compulsions exploited by these shows, Bakemonogatari and Nisemonogatari puts these things out in the open. For example, a typical anime harem series features a boy surrounded by girls interested in him, but it seems to be deemed unworthy of him to ever be shown as anything but put upon or annoyed by the girls. The girls, meanwhile, are typically an array of types--dumb and subservient, dumb and horny, dumb and irritable, or possessing an extraordinary intelligence that makes them impossibly socially awkward, until they gasp in astonishment when the male lead kindly offers his handkerchief or something without seeming like it was much effort for the amazing him.

Bakemonogatari takes these types, then asks what if the guy dared look into the girl's minds and what if the girls were capable of looking back? In order to preserve the forms, perhaps then it's inevitable we end up with S&M.



Nisemonogatari opens with the male lead, Araragi, finding he's been kidnapped and restrained in an abandoned school by his girlfriend, Senjogahara, who's identified directly in the first series as being the character type "tsundere", which refers to a girl who is externally hostile but holds an awkwardly concealed affection for the male lead. The delightful thing about Senjogahara and Araragi is that the hostility is a facade they're both aware of. Only Senjogahara seems slightly more cognisant of it than Araragi, or rather is more comfortable acknowledging the truth.



It looks like this series is actually going to focus on Araragi's sisters starting with the second episode, two characters who existed mostly only in voiceovers in the first series. I'm eager to see where director Akiyuki Shinbo is taking us next.

Shitake Bendy Straw

I think I'm feeling last night's vodka martini/sleep deprivation cocktail. It's a potent one, I can tell you. Sleep deprivation normally makes me anxious because it makes it really hard for me to make decisions. With the alcohol taking care of the inhibitions, it was actually pretty nice. I watched Pickup on South Street again--there's a compulsively watchable movie for you. It's like a snackfood and each minute makes you want to eat another piece. It's appropriate, I guess, one of the main characters is named Candy.

It was one of three DVDs I got for Christmas, along with River of No Return and The Trouble with Harry. I'm not a difficult person to shop for--my mother asked me for a list of things to choose from so I got paper and pen and listed something like forty movies without breaking stride. I also bought copies of Paprika and Pale Flower.



I have so much vodka right now. In addition to a twenty dollar 1.75 l bottle of Stolichnaya I got from CostCo, my sister gave me a 750 ml bottle of Grey Goose. I would say Grey Goose is my favourite vodka, though I don't necessarily think it's smoother than the typically cheaper Stolichnaya. I think it's the rye in Stolichnaya giving it a slightly spicier flavour. I love the bit about vodka in The Bell Jar;

“I’ll have a vodka,” I said.

The man looked at me more closely. “With anything?”

“Just plain,” I said. “I always have it plain.”

I thought I might make a fool of myself by saying I’d have it with ice or gin or anything. I’d seen a vodka ad once, just a glass full of vodka standing in the middle of a snowdrift in a blue light, and the vodka looked clear and pure as water, so I thought having vodka plain must be all right. My dream was someday ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.



I guess it is kind of like that.

Last night I dreamt someone who's not talking to me was looking for a book, a big white leather bound catalogue of some kind, so I snuck into her library and left it on a shelf, only to find she'd already gotten a newer edition of this catalogue. Well, I can pat myself on the back for the thought, anyway.

I like the leather bound books Barnes and Noble has right now. They're the sorts of things that make me wish I had a big, gorgeous library. Though it bugs me their edition of the Sherlock Holmes stories doesn't have the Sidney Paget illustrations and the cover art for some of them, like the Lewis Carroll collection, is really bad. But I love how their edition of Arabian Nights looks like the copy Mina has in the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula. That one I might get.

Just Drawn That Way

This is the raven I nearly collided with at the mall to-day. You might not be able to tell from the pictures I post, but a lot of these fellows are bigger than chickens, as this one was. It was almost a tackle. Instead he stared at me a moment then flew up into that tree.

More pictures I've taken recently;











I had to be out of the house at 9am to-day, cutting two hours out of my sleep, so I wandered quite zombie-like through two malls. I drove around listening to songs in languages I don't understand, first Wagner then April March.

Speaking of zombies, I've found them to be a vital part of my gameplay strategy with my newest Skyrim character, Lysithea;



I think I was going for a Siouxie Sioux as an evil nun look. As in the previous Elder Scrolls games, magic's divided into schools. I find it obnoxious how they treat it like science, with NPCs discussing "Alteration theory" and the like. But it is fun to use. It's incredibly easy levelling up in Illusion, and consequently my character isn't very good at much else. I use three Illusion skills most of the time--Fear, Frenzy, and Invisibility. I go about invisible most of the time because most enemies can one-shot me now, since I put no points into Health and Stamina when levelling up. When I come across something like a room full of enemies, I cast Frenzy on one, so he attacks his fellows, and I turn myself invisible again whilst watching the mayhem. And often I turn my slaughtered foes or other convenient corpses into zombies to fight for me. It's a satisfyingly sinister way of playing the game. When it's just one enemy, I cast Fear and either allow it to flee out of range or corner it and slaughter it. Being evil is so much fun.

Speaking of which, I was amused by the phoney outrage in this Huffington Post article about Star Wars: Old Republic yesterday. Apparently people are outraged that, when playing an evil character, you can have a slave that you can torture. Putting aside the question, "Hasn't anyone heard of Return of the Jedi and Slave Leia?" I find it really pathetic that people blame video game companies for their own behaviour. The quote in the article from one angry player;

"I cannot remember a single video game experience that has made me feel quite as dirty and evil as my relationship with Vette has. I wish I could take it all back, but it's too late; BioWare has made me hate myself. That was not the emotional engagement I was looking for."

BioWare has made him hate himself. Good grief, what a callow, quivering, overgrown lamb. I hope he never has to set foot outside his sleeping bag into the real world where there are even more horrible, horrible options.

I've watched Tim play a lot of Old Republic. The graphics are hideous, but it seems like it's superior to other MMORPGs in its extensive use of storytelling, with lots of dialogue. It reminded me strongly of what I liked about the old Knights of the Old Republic games. With the addition of a voice for your own character, something found in BioWare's more recent single player games. Which is something I like because it helps bring reality to your own character, something sadly neglected by many games, but I continue in not understanding and being really irritated by the fact that the written dialogue you choose for your character is often wildly different from what they actually say. I get the impression BioWare sees it as just rephrasing, but it's often as different as, "No," and, "So how are the bacta tanks to-day?"

Twitter Sonnet #341

Butter lives melt on the pancake angel.
Bargain maple repels shadow power.
Curtailed candlesticks fade behind grey gel.
Life hiding makes asparagus sour.
Southern belles preferred ribbon shibari.
Vivien Leigh swooned in spider cadence.
Video trains conquered the Atari.
Numbered memories give one confidence.
Grey haired Scooby Doo beckons to Saint Joan.
Cells recycled preserve the mystery.
Mammoth eyelash mosquito nets melt bone.
Spandex conceals gymnastic misery.
Now it's a good time to buy candy canes.
Fill stockings with tubers before it rains.

Rivers Bigger than Drama

I kind of knew what I was getting into with River of No Return. I knew I was watching for the visuals and maybe performances and that it was otherwise going to be a flawed film. But the visuals, particularly on a widescreen television, indeed made the film worthwhile.



Visuals both in terms of the copious Alberta location shots and in terms of Marilyn Monroe. It's nice seeing one of the rare occasions where she's not playing the dumb blonde and she's given some satisfactorily sassy lines. But the plot is fuelled by how her emotions make her wrong about men and how it's up to Robert Mitchum to endure her and straighten her out.

Of all the 1950s movies I've seen, this one is the purest distillation of the uglier attitudes people associate with the period. From the moral supremacy of capitalist white men to the portrayal of Native Americans as evil incarnate.



Even so, I always enjoy Robert Mitchum's alcohol fuelled unflappability. It's only the fact that he seems half awake the whole time that keeps his character from being thoroughly obnoxious. But even that couldn't stop my stomach from turning in a scene where Mitchum seems unambiguously trying to rape Monroe.



His character, Matt Calder, had seemed to be fairly reasonable up to that point, a farmer whose livelihood had been stolen from him by Kay's (Monroe) gambler boyfriend. Then out of nowhere he attacks her--it's a long scene and it's simply ugly. Gods, it's on the poster in Wikipedia;



The sudden appearance of a mountain lion is the only thing that stops him, and afterwards the characters don't even seem to acknowledge what happened except for an off-hand remark from Mitchum, "Back there, I didn't mean it." Matter closed. Not that she even seemed to care, or even seemed particularly traumatised afterwards, though she was screaming, kicking, and clawing frantically during the event.

But if one ignores this (which is not the same as ignoring the issue of misogyny--I have to point this out because there are people who'd say it's the same thing), one can enjoy Otto Preminger's singular vision of Alberta, his camera capturing peculiarly blue rivers and richly coloured clouds.



There's a minimal amount of studio shots, and there are times when one can see Monroe or Mitchum is clearly piloting the raft moving on the titular river. With Monroe's stand alone musical numbers, there's valuable spectacle here.

A War is a War of Course, of Course

It's amazing how long it can take to remove the Christmas lights from a tree. It seems like it took the better part of the day.

Most of yesterday seemed like it was taken up by War Horse, one of Steven Spielberg's less remarkable, more sentimental endeavours. There were moments that wavered from cheaply precious to evocative of the inhumanity of war, but such moments were few.

It had a mostly good cast. Benedict Cumberbatch had a small role which he perfectly executed as a British cavalry officer.

But I kept looking at this guy;



I wondered why he looked so familiar. Then I realised he was the guy who played Loki rather memorably in the Thor movie, Tom Hiddleston. But even after realising this, I still kept feeling an inexplicable sensation of familiarity. Finally I realised he reminded me of this lieutenant from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.



Not a dead ringer, but the same crystal eyes and old fashioned young and earnest manner. It served to remind me how remarkable a film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is--a British film made during World War II that paints a portrait of the humanity common to both sides of the conflict better than War Horse, a modern American film about World War I.

Part of the problem, certainly, is that the film's anchored on an animal who, despite Spielberg's considerable talents at creating visual narrative, never feels like a character. Hiddleston and Cumberbatch are in the film too briefly, and the spot of lead human is mostly filled by this dopey looking mug.



Maybe Spielberg's plan was to make the horse seem smart by comparison. Unfortunately it ends up just ensuring this feels like Thomas Kinkade: The Motion Picture.

Satan Considers

Astaroth sure looks . . . pleased? He's doing some rather solemn splits, isn't he?

To the Devil a Daughter is a remarkably muddled Hammer horror film with a wonderful cast--Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, Nastassja Kinski, and Denholm Elliot. Its director, Peter Sykes, has some interesting ideas but doesn't seem to have known how to thread them together into a film properly.

The first half hour or so of the film I wasn't sure what was going on. We see Denholm Elliot talking to Richard Widmark at a bookstore but don't know why. This comes after Christopher Lee in priest's garb refusing to recant for possible heresy possibly in Munich. We see scenes of a woman giving birth to a deformed child that might possibly be a flashback or an event similar to one recalled by Kinski's character.

After we've been given to endure scenes of people going to and from places, the movie finally lets us in on the fact that Catherine (Kinski) has been entrusted by her father (Elliot) to Verney's (Widmark) care because Verney's an expert on the occult and Catherine's been raised by a cult of Astaroth worshippers in order to be a sacrifice.



The movie treads water trying to create suspense, having Verney leave the girl in the care of some friends for no apparent reason at one point, except so that he can come back and chase her, and we have an excruciatingly pointless scene of him lowering a bridge to get to her.

There's a bloody foetus puppet that looks like it might have been inspired by the Gauze Baby from Eraserhead.



There's a generally more cold/trippy quality than older Hammer films, a quality that reminds one more of mainstream horror films from the 70s and early 80s. It certainly shows the influence of The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby.



The performances are the best part. Kinski is sweet and very beautiful, not giving a complex performance, but a perfectly convincing one. Christopher Lee has great adversarial chemistry with both Widmark and Elliot. Elliot creates some tension by being rather convincingly out of his wits with fear, Widmark is good as a sort of anachronistic old fashion American movie hero. There was a scene I really liked when Lee hypnotises Elliot over the phone to make him think there's a snake coiled around his wrist. I love movies where magic isn't governed by an immediately perceptible set of rules.



Lee presides over the death of a woman giving birth to a demon child--the woman's evidently also a member of the cult. He leans over her as she dies, his smiling face close to hers and I wondered if that's really a good idea to do with someone when they're dying. I suppose it probably depends on the person. I'd feel really awkward, myself. I wonder if the Satanic priest Lee was playing was really feeling comforting, loving sentiments, or was he just putting it on for the woman's benefit? Which would be better? I suspect this isn't the train of thought the movie intended.

I thought of this again when I watched this holiday YouTube message from Christopher Lee this morning;





It's pretty normal for actors to be a little vain, but I couldn't help feeling like Lee was recounting to himself all the love and admiration he's accrued in attempt to outstrip the feelings he has about his impending death. And I don't think he succeeded. I don't think anyone's ever going to be able to put an effective, positive spin on death for me. If there are any vampires out there looking for someone to give the gift of eternal life, please, can you ask for a better candidate than Christopher Lee?

Twitter Sonnet #340

Living Seven Up cans reject the dot.
Shimmering green metal shoots a beetle.
Cloudy muscles succumb to ether rot.
Baby ribbons split on the new needle.
Double spaced chariots present a nude.
Fashion closes black battery circuit.
It's only the misnamed walrus was booed.
Salmon, do heed this media racket.
Self sabotaging gardeners plant rabbits.
Steak won't bring back your life or magicka.
Strip poker takes more from nuns than habits.
Mines will one day reclaim Metallica.
Wet crow feathers stab the yellow pencil.
Hunted graphite fingers are prehensile.

Punishment or a Day's Work?

I've found my favourite Irene Adler. The first episode of the new season of Sherlock is the best episode of the series and I highly doubt there'll be a better one. "A Scandal in Belgravia" features an extraordinary harmony of plot and theme. It's the best thing Steven Moffat's written since Doctor Who's "Forest of the Dead".

It's a pastiche that riffs off a number of ideas introduced in the original Conan Doyle stories, one of the most prominent being Irene Adler. We don't really learn a lot about her in "A Scandal in Bohemia", the story in which she originally appears. We know she's immensely clever and enjoys the thrill of trafficking in the world of powerful politicians, using blackmail to hold nothing more than the ability to move about this world with power and autonomy. And we know she outsmarts Holmes, that she's the one woman for whom he has respect. Moffat's instincts are infallible here as he navigates through a series of plot twists, as Adler and Holmes continually one up each other reaching higher and higher stakes. It's a contest between Adler and Holmes, and at the same time it's a contest between mind and heart, or rather who's letting heart dictate their actions, on top of the original subtext of whether or not that's ever a good idea.



"A Scandal in Belgravia" fulfils the promise of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes better than The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes did. Moffat never goes all in--we never get a statement that says more about Holmes' heart than the original stories did. Instead, Moffat teases out the ambiguity. Making Adler a dominatrix is the perfect compliment to this, it helps underline the sexual energy that's so potent because it presents questions that are simply never answered.



Lara Pulver as Adler delivers this material so much better than Alex Kingston does as the similarly sexually provocative River Song character on Doctor Who partly because Pulver has the look down more than the soccer mom-ish Kingston and partly because the chemistry between Holmes and Adler here supports this stuff. Gods, I wish Moffat would stop writing what he thinks six year olds would like to see. He's so much better when he writes for an adult like himself, and I suspect the six year olds would prefer it too.

Is It Love?

When I went to see A Dangerous Method in La Jolla on Thursday, the fog was rolling up off the sea like a blanket. I wish I could've gotten better pictures. It totally obscured the nearby Mormon Palace. It's not actually a palace, I just like to call it that. It's a decadent temple that looks a bit like Space Mountain.

You can see religion all over the place in La Jolla, the most expensive place to live in the county. Anne Rice lived there for a while. I think she might appreciate this calendar I saw in the mall there;



I'd wandered into the calendar shop waiting for my tea to steep and I'm not kidding when I say, at first glance, I'd thought I was in a gay porn section. When I realised it was a religious calendar I grinned and couldn't stop grinning for fifteen minutes. The proximity of the Playboy calendars completes it. How can anyone kid themselves about what Jesus is doing with that guy?

Last night I drank 18 year Glenlivet and watched When Harry Met Sally with my sister. I hadn't seen that movie in a very long time. After The Princess Bride, I'd say it's Rob Reiner's second best film. And it's just amazing seeing Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan when they still had real faces. The dialogue is cute, particularly Billy Crystal's, though not all of it rings true, like when he remarks on how she's the first attractive young woman he's met that he didn't want to sleep with. I also don't think her fake orgasm is very convincing.

Wow. I see Meg Ryan's Wikipedia entry has a photo of her at the premiere of a production of Das Rheingold. Okay, universe, I get it. Wagner. What do you want me to do with this? What's that? You want me to do a painting with you holding me from behind suggestively?