wildcat

For the record, the Oxford English Dictionary spells it "hookah," derived from the Urdu "hukkah" (meaning "casket"), but I suspect the myriad proto-spellings are just as good, because as Jo observed, it was originally in a completely foreign language to English.

Hero is amazing. The story's much less complicated than it seems, because it relies heavily on the "he said, she said" mentality of pitting different variations on an event up on the screen. You rebel against the new interpretation at first because you've just seen it - quite clearly, quite cinematically. Some beautiful sequences. It doesn't say anything peculiarly profound - "violence isn't just wrong, it's not enlightened enough" - but the beauty of the film more than makes up for that.

Bon Voyage - which is French - is similarly amazing. It was a weekend of subtitles and good movies. It's a very straightforward faux-forties Noir/Melodrama picture, hilarious in a lot of places but with absolutely beautiful work on cinematography, attention to detail, and acting. It features a genre story with all the usual hallmarks (the trashy actress bad girl, the pert and intellectual good girl who I'm surprised never had to "let her hair down," the doddering scientist, et cetera), and the lead actor was absolutely adorable, even stupid (he kept helping the bad girl who constantly manipulated him). It was murder, it was Nazis, it was the German occupation of France, it was everything. It had heavy water in it and everything.

But there's the other thing - the hookah - which we tried on Friday night in our backyard, with Michael, Jo, and Andrew. It was well worth it to attempt, strawberry and mint flavoured. I'd like to include a scene with one in a film, I was thinking perhaps for the music video we have to do for Video Production class in January; I'd like to get Semi-Louise passing around a hookah pipe.

Less than a week until the three day novel! I'm excited, I suspect it'll be a surrealist sci-fi Kilgore farce. With an ultra-mule.