This Thanksgiving was spent all by my lonesome, with Alex gone to Portland and the buses having stopped running so I couldn't go to the little gathering I was invited to. I baked an apple pie with a lattice top, a turkey lasagna, and made some mashed potatoes. All good! The turkey lasagna was a weird compromise based on the idea that my mom would make stuffed shells at family holiday dinners for my vegetarian brother, liking turkey but having cooked a turkey breast like two weeks ago, and having lasagna noodles around for a while. The lattice top was an attempt to try something new that would be visually impressive when I went to someone else's gathering, but then that didn't happen and yeah a lattice top is just not as delicious as the crumb topping.

But on Tuesday I grabbed some movies from the library. I've watched two of those. One was the Philip Kaufman adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, which I got with pretty much no expectations- I think I wrote earlier about how the book wasn't very good, (with the exception of the one line that was transformed into the name of last year's Shining album) and thought that maybe the movie would bypass some of my problems, with the addition of nudity! It's not a good movie. Leaving aside the source material: The cinematography is pretty decent. Daniel Day-Lewis looks like a jackass throughout, in that he seems like a late-eighties idea of what a man who can have sex with whoever would look like- Someone I'd like to punch in the face! And do to the aging of that type of eighties idea, it actually is almost kitschy, not a monster at all. Juliette Binoche is alright, charming in some kind of twee way.

But tonight I watched Black Narcissus, the Powell And Pressburger film from right before The Red Shoes, which I haven't seen. I really liked the solo Michael Powell film, Peeping Tom, and that one made me reconsider my preconceptions about them as being like Merchant-Ivory type boredom peddlers. Now I'm watching the documentary on the cinematography, which is fucking great, especially for technicolor technology, which, as the documentary explains, is fucking crazy. As for the plot- It's easy to get characters confused, what with most of them being identically dressed nuns, and with that so goes thematic conflicts. Two notes: one being that Pink Narcissus is a gay porn film made by a guy there's a song about on the new Matmos, and the other being that there's an Indian actress in the film whose real name is Jean Simmons, which is funny to me. It's a good movie. The next Powell/Pressburger movie I see will probably be The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, which Patton Oswalt named as one of his three favorite movies- unranked, just one of those "oh I can't just pick one" moments.

The third movie, which I haven't watched yet, is Jean Cocteau's Testament Of Orpheus.