Backtracking: Wednesday night, cheeseburgers and garlic fries for dinner, then plowed through three hours of The Decalogue instead of the films I had planned. Since Decalogue is actually 10 films, an hour each, each exploring one of the Ten Commandments, it is a huge block of viewing time on my list, so I decided to tackle a chunk of it. Now, let me state that these films are excellent. Their delicacy of approach, consistency of tone, quality of performances and writing are beyond reproach. That said, for the most part, they are also hugely depressing, as only a set of ten films based on the Ten Commandments set in late '80's Poland in a drab, grey apartment building can be. So watching them all at a shot is not only unrealistic due to the amount of time involved, it also would involve a call to Dr. Kevorkian by the end of it all. Piece-mealing it out was the only way to go.

Yesterday, got up and exercised, breakfasted, and polished off The Decalogue, moving on to Visconti's The Leopard, a sumptuous and very personal period drama set in 1860's Italy. Not enough can be said about its eye-popping production design, graceful and beautiful cinematography, disciplined, nuanced acting by Burt Lancaster in the title role, nor can enough be said about the fact that it is a very, very, very, very long 3 hours of movie-watching. One can't help but be impressed by its majesties and subtleties but one can't help wondering whether the American distributors, who cut 40 minutes from the film for its US release, might have been on to something. Inasmuch as it is a deeply personal film for Visconti, who, as his name suggests, descended from the Italian aristocracy whose decline the film (with a certain moral ambiguity) dramatizes, it might be seen as a trifle self-indulgent. By me, at least.

Made some sauteed scallops, pasta with sundried tomatoes and some aspargus for dinner last night, watched Denis Leary's TV show, which seems to be pushing the boundaries of what's acceptable on TV more for the sake of notoriety than for anything else. The show is called Rescue Me, and its dramatically fertile setting is a New York City firehouse. Sadly, the characters are a little one-dimensional, the conceits (Leary, an alcoholic, keeps hallucinating dead people he's rescued speaking to him; he also has earnest conversations with his dead cousin, also a firefighter) are tiresome, and we've seen them before (Scorsese's Bringing out the Dead, for example). There are flashes of wit, humor and honest emotion from time to time, amidst the truly gratuitous explicit sex scenes; it just all feels a little forced.

Then it was a round of Xbox with good friend Jimbo; he beat me by three strokes to avenge the drubbing I gave him a couple of weeks ago.

Today, a little slow getting going. But, finally got down to the exercise room for a half hour on the bloody bicycle, then brunch, of a sort, and after this blog, a movie or two. The guy who lives downstairs is a big fan of incredibly repetitive urban music -- the kind that consists of 8 bars of drum and bass endlessly repeated for 10 or 20 minutes at a time. Just loud enough to be heard through the floor. Ah, he just changed it. A minute ago it was going BUH BOOOM BOOOOM BUH-BOOM (2,3,4) BUH BOOOM BOOOOM BUH-BOOM (2,3,4) BUH BOOOM BOOOOM BUH-BOOM (2,3,4) ad nauseam.

Now something a little less complex, a little number I call Doo-BOOM. Goes like this: Doo-BOOM (3,4) Doo-BOOM (3,4) Doo-BOOM (3,4) Doo-BOOM (3,4) Doo-BOOM (3,4) Doo-BOOM (3,4) Doo-BOOM (3,4) Doo-BOOM (3,4) Doo-BOOM (3,4) etc. I am not sure what film to watch but it is gonna be something with a cranking 5.1 soundtrack. 200 watt subwoofer to the rescue.