Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Prickly père

Finally saw the delightful French ensemble piece tonight about social advancement and the quest for love that everyone around me has been raving about. Look At Me (Comme Une Image) is a character-driven comedy-drama that focusses on the tensions raging within an extended circle of friends and family in the Parisian art world.

Lolita is a sensitive young student singer battling with weight, self-esteem issues and the over-wrought ego of her writer father. The arrogant and pugnacious father, Etienne, is in turn struggling with the needs of a wife young enough to be his daughter, writer's block, and against a literary world that is beginning to overlook him in favour of younger writers. One such writer, who Etienne takes under his wing, tussles with critics who have, until now, ignored him. And his wife, Sylvia, gives Lolita extra singing lessons so that she and her husband can curry favour with Etienne and his infamy.

Are you still with me? Look At Me somehow balances all these egos to produce a witty and moving film, which also has an exquisite soundtrack featuring the choral music of Monteverdi and Mozart. The BBC has aptly described it as "French as Camembert and Sacha Distel, only considerably less cheesy".

Afterwards, we hot-footed it to Malaysia Kopi Tiam in Chinatown, where we downed iced red bean drink, and stuffed ourselves with mixed vegetable curry, curry laksa mee, yam cakes and herb jelly.

Other links today:
+ I am curious (BLACK)! Superman's girlfriend Lois Lane turns black for the day in this hilarious and very cheesy edition of the Lois Lane comic.

+ HP is sending digital cameras to a remote Papua New Guinea tribe, whether they want them or not. Absurd and insulting.

+ The rebel sell. If we all hate consumerism, how come we can’t stop shopping?

+ Homer Simpson uses tabbed browsing! Strictly for nerds like me.

+ "Web designers have dropped the proverbial sketch book and traded it in for Microsoft Word and CSS." Airbag declares personal web design dead as standards and the blog format create generic designs.

+ "Significant amounts of dioxin poison could remain in Yushchenko's system for the rest of his life, in effect continually poisoning him and leaving him permanently disfigured." What is dioxin, anyway? Where does it come from? And are its effects reversible?

+ "Scrooge has been called ungenerous. I say that's a bum rap. What could be more generous than keeping your lamps unlit and your plate unfilled, leaving more fuel for others to burn and more food for others to eat?" What I like about Scrooge. In praise of misers.

+ Dom Perignon was originally employed by his wine-making abbey to get the bubbles out of champagne. Thank God he failed.

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