… let’s just hope everyone has the sense to send them off to a nice, comfy retirement… in other words, let’s hope Hollywood has the sense not to do with the movie what was done with the books! I know that may sound like blasphemy to some, but the incredible and fabulous success of the books also spawned loads and loads of trash literature, fantasy novels simply retreading the paces of Tolkien, but less brilliantly, with less honesty and beauty and intelligence… to the point where, if you wanna publish fantasy and it’s not at least a trilogy, I’ve heard, …

Ooops, I wrote this about a week ago but left it in draft format, and forgot to publish it. So now I am. Eeek! Over on my other little side-project, New Sophists’ Almanac, in a post called Asthmatic Aesthetics, my blogmate Marvin brought up this Quentin Tarantino film that he was excited about, called Kill Bill Vol. 1. Knowing only that it was Tarantino (but thereb knowing a fair bit) I decided I’d see it, if only to have one more “aesthetic experience” to discuss with Marvin. (We’re discussing that sticky area of philosophy, aesthetics, these days… tying to brains …

Rabbi Daniel Lapin on Mel Gibson’s Passion on National Review Online Fascinating. The only thing I fear is his conclusion is wrong, and that Bush is the biggest threat to Western Civilization. Hm.

I just saw a Korean movie that surprised me in a few ways: I understood enough of it to get surprised looks from the girls who were sitting next to me (strangers, but, see, Korean theaters used assigned seating and no matter how uncomfortable they are with the idea of sitting beside some old foreigner, pretty girls usually just go on ahead and obey their tickets and sit down beside me). I realized after that it was because I was laughing at things in the dialogue that they assumed I would not understand, as well as laughing when I heard …