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These are older shows so I won't do full-blown reviews, but I really enjoyed watching Chocolat the other night. It was an intriguing look into the lives - fictional though they were - of the inhabitants of a small, über-Catholic French village, and what happens when a mysterious stranger, daughter in tow, shows up and opens a hedonistic chocolate shoppe... right in the middle of Lent. Not only that, she believes in a world that works for everyone, which mightily offends the de-facto ruler of the town, an anal-retentive pharisee masterfully played by Alfred Molina.

Oddly enough, the protagonist of the film (Juliette Binoche) doesn't even show up on the first page of the cast list at IMDB - her performance was delightful and powerful. In fact, everyone did a wonderful job. Leslie Caron was woefully underused as the love interest of an old widower, but brought dignity and class to her rôle nonetheless. I loved Judi Dench as Armande, Vianne's landlady and, ultimately, best customer and friend. Johnny Depp plays a river-faring Irish traveler who injects both romance and tension into the lives of the players;

I never got bored watching this film, which had the independent feel and almost reminded me of some of the earlier French existentialist films; it has a good message and left me feeling both fulfilled for the characters and hungry for chocolate... I recommend it highly.

Overall rating: Nine stars out of ten.


Night before last we watched Kate and Leopold. I never realized it had an (admittedly feeble) time-travel premise, and always thought it was just another chick flick. I was right about the second part; it was entertaining, but not stellar. In fact, while Hugh Jackman was wonderful as the temporally-displaced Duke, Meg Ryan's character was so annoying I found myself wanting to slap her every five minutes. Nice that they have the chance to live happily ever after in the 19th Century, but I can't see Ryan's character being happy serving high tea in the garden forever.

Overall rating: Five stars out of ten.

Life Begins When... Posted without further comment

"Now for me, life is going to start, now I'll tell you when, if I see this government encouraging the arts in this country, and spending their money on things like opera, and concerts, and new music, the sort of thing that people don't do any more, but want some crank like myself to put on some wild concert, people come to that, but if you put on a concert of music by Honegger or Schonberg, or Bartok, the public keeps away, and it's up to you, to you, all of you, to attend these functions, to encourage the arts, and see that the money is spent on things like an opera house, you know, you know, that I was told the other day that the Hamburg town council spends more money on the opera alone than the arts council spends on the entire arts in Great Britain. But then, take it this way, look at the money we spend on armament, look at the money we devote to senseless things, and for me, I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about me, now, for me, life is going to start when I find myself when I find myself living in a proper civilized society, with no color bar, and no race riots, and that's not the worst, but in a society, where young people stand up when they feel that some injustice is done, because they don't, people don't stand up, they will not stand up, they sit back and they say "well, this is a great pity," and that's that. But that's when life is going to start for me, when I find people standing up and do something about things they feel strongly about, these appalling things.
Gerard Hoffnung at the Oxford Union: December 4, 1958

Hoffnung, who could be said to have lived more in 34 years than five people lived in a full lifetime, passed away less than a year after giving the comedic discourse of which this was the conclusion.