At last, the final dredges of the devil bug are leaving my system. This is the first day in almost a week that I have woken up at a reasonable time and not reached for the tissues, and had an appetite. Went out to the pharmacy, the bakery and the Burger King and am feeling a good deal more ambitious today than in some time. Speaking of ambitious, G has a job interview today!

Ah, here's good news. Mr. Repetitive downstairs has cranked up the stereo again. The hit parade today goes something like this: boom boom buh boom boom. boom boom buh boom boom. boom boom buh boom boom. boom boom buh boom boom. boom boom buh boom boom. boom boom buh boom boom. boom boom buh boom boom. boom boom buh boom boom. boom boom buh boom boom. boom boom buh boom boom. boom boom buh boom boom. boom boom buh boom boom. Over and over and over and over again, and each selection seems to last 15 minutes. Really bloody distracting. Time to lay a little Afrocelts on them.

The last couple of days I have been catching up on my AFI viewing obligations. Recently watched The Piano, and boggled at the warm reception given it by so many. In case you don't know, the film stars Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel's penis, of which far too much has been seen and written about for my taste.

Hunter plays a mute named Ada, married off by her father to a New Zealand homesteader despite the fact that, with a child of her own and having already been married, this would be extremely unlikely to occur (so why does it happen? so the movie can take place; there's no other significant rationale offered). So she and her all-too-precious, tooth-achingly precocious daughter are off to the land of the Maori.

That's just the conceit that sets the groundwork for a film riddled with them. The central conceit of the film is that Ada, being mute, expresses herself through her piano. This magical instrument can somehow be transported for months, unplayed, in a crate below decks in a damp sailing vessel, from Scotland to New Zealand, and remain more or less perfectly in tune. What's more, it can be left on the beach, partially uncrated, for several days, with the sea lapping about its feet, and remain in tune. But let's forget about that because it provides the opportunity to shoot lovely, lyrical sequences of Ada playing the piano as the tide roils at her feet.

When the instrument is acquired by Keitel's character, he has it transported from the beach, through the jungle, and somehow this knocks it out of tune when months of exposure to salt air and moisture had not done the job. So, deep in the New Zealand jungle, far removed from any outpost of civilization . . . he conjures up a professional piano tuner. Now I'm no Van Cliburn . . . but this whole thing seems a little far-fetched.

And so, Ada is able to "speak" again. Well, if the anachronistic, melodically aimless and harmonically frilly twaddle she produces on the piano are any indication, Ada's thoughts are mostly of afternoons spent in day spas relaxing with cucumber slices upon the eyes to the strains of Windham Hill-style new age noodlings.

So I suppose if that doesn't work for you, the film won't either, and indeed that was the case for me. I found the characters one-dimensional in the extreme, but presented and dealt with as if they were enormously complex. I found the whole affair almost laughably forced and pretentious, and its pretensions muted and muddled whatever feminist subtext the director clearly intended. The photography was excellent, but the editing was often choppy and unfocused, cut for effect rather than coherence in presentation. Couldn't end soon enough.

Phew. Next up at Michael's Festival of Curiously Overpraised Cinema was Max Ophuls' 1955 Lola Montes. This was an ornate Cinemascope epic about the life and times of, apparently, one of Europe's most famous sluts, and for me, epically uninvolving. The film, I suppose, hinges on once's acceptance of Carole Martin's role performance as the title character, and I found her distinctly lacking. Structurally, the film is interesting, utilizing an anti-chronological perspective to tell her story; visually, it is opulent, and the design and execution of the circus scenes are excellent; but at a certain point I felt that it was much ado about nothing. The Cinemascope format did not suit Ophuls, whose other works in standard format involved a great deal of intricate camera movement; here the visuals lumber, although there are eye-opening sequences from time to time. That critics from Truffaut to Andrew Sarris have declared this among "the greatest films of all time" boggles the mind.

Finally, a genuine artistic classic, Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour. This is less a film than a poem, in my view. The view of Resnais' contemporaries is that it is the closest to a literary work as the cinema has ever come, but I would submit that it is far more like a poem by, say, Anne Sexton than a novel. The tragedy and devastation of Hiroshima is reflected by, and reflects, a personal tragedy and the emotional devastation of the protagonist. Intimate and yet strangely removed, and in no way trivializing either tragedy, it is a stirring piece and one that I will have to view again to see it in full measure.

Today, a little relaxation, then a couple of more films, more reading, and hopefully an evening get-together with Shome and Peter.

[Listening to: Colossus (Live at KCRW) - Afrocelts - Live at KCRW (06:26)]