Anime recommendation for the week: Trigun. Delightful science fiction Western spoof with really good storytelling to boot. Two female insurance agents pursue the elusive Vash the Stampede across a surreal landscape, only hoping to reach him before any of the bounty hunters seeking the astronomical price on his head get to him. But maybe he's been lurking right under their noses all along! My DVD was screwed up and wouldn't let me run the Japanese dialogue with English subtitles, so I watched the first 4 episodes in English and still was busting up. This is a very good sign.

David Lynch recommendation for the week: Mulholland Dr. Loved it loved it loved it. Utterly stylish and mindbending, it reminded me (once again) why I'm never moving back to southern California. I cannot say enough about how good Naomi Watts is in this film. I don't think she's done a whole lot since Flirting, but that shouldn't be a problem anymore. Justin Theroux is also great as the director who is a little too self-assured for his own good. Lynch pulls a total Orson Welles F for Fake where he tells you he's going to fuck with you and then he does and you're not even paying attention and you kick yourself when you remember. It all makes sense at the end if you think about it, really it does.

Lust object of the week: Toshiro Mifune. It started when I saw Seven Samurai, but I saw Yojimbo this week and now it's full-blown. That man transmits more with one twitch of his shoulder than most actors do when they're chewing the scenery. Yojimbo is the darkly comic fable of what happens when one bored and broke samurai wanders into a town where two bosses are having a very public feud. Much conniving and swordplay ensue.

Restaurant of the week: Grub. My wonderful server didn't laugh at my laryngitis and instead offered me tea with honey and lemon. When he brought me my appetizer of fried bread with garlic butter and gorgonzola, he apologized for not warning me how big the plate would be. I thought, no problem I'll just eat half. Hah. By the time my seared ahi arrived I was licking the plate clean. He only teased me a little when I asked him to pack half of the fish to go.

Introspective play of the week: Copenhagen. Michael Frayn's exposition of what might have happened at Heisenberg's 1941 visit to Niels and Margrethe Bohr. Definitely a cerebral play. Three actors, three chairs, a lot of talking. Mariette Hartley as Margrethe, Len Cariou as Bohr, and Hank Stratton as Heisenberg. I was in the second row drinking cough suppressant straight out of the bottle in a futile attempt to keep my lungs from spasming. I think I was a little stoned for at least the first portion of the play, but I remained riveted from beginning to end while others in the audience around me fell asleep with alarming regularity. To me the script was all about choice and responsibility. It reminded me of my Grandpa, a brilliant scientist who was called away from his professorship during World War II to work on the Manhattan Project. I have struggled with how I should feel about his contribution to what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and by the time I was old enough to want to ask him about it he was already gone. Last year my aunt bequeathed to my brother and me a scrapbook that Grandpa kept about the project. And in that book, after the letters from the government, the diagrams of the reactor, pictures of the test site, he had pasted a photograph of a Japanese burn victim. A mother with her baby. My heart broke. Grandpa struggled too, more than I can possibly realize. Now I can honestly say that I am proud of him.

Trigun
Mulholland Dr.
Copenhagen