tuong

listening: amadou et mariam: dimanche à bamako. wikipedia says that they are a blind couple and that this particular album is produced by manu chao. it is the music that causes happiness mixed with sorrow.

around christmas we didn't exchange gifts nor do anything special but eat holiday cookies and contemplate the melting snow, watching a film here or there.

we went to a tapas restaurant to meet my cousin and his fiancée. the restaurant is expensive but the food is of high quality with proper service and ambiente.

if you are not shy then you can get more things. by asking politely, we found that an chau stocks whole pork trotters that can be sliced to order, also pork neckbones. we'll make bún bò huê if everything goes accordingly.

bullet-pointed movie review. POINT BREAK, STARRING KEANU REAVES

• i am having been of two minds, one for ironic, one for candid
  
• i should have watched the movie ironically because of what we learned from HOT FUZZ
  
• i should have watched the movie candidly because i favorably received HEAT, STARRING VAL KILMER. HEAT, however, has better acting, plausible event logic and complex characters. it would be a mistake to watch POINT BREAK any other way than ironically, since it would have disappointed me to have approached it like HEAT.
  
• the event logic is the special point of the movie. a common complaint from people watching movies is "that could never happen!" i think the outrage is not that people dislike implausibility or untruth, but that they dislike being an object of deception. i.e. they don't like having to decide to reject something that was intended for them to have accepted. but if you do not feel that there is any intent of deception, then you will not let an implausible event structure bother you.
  
• the woman who keanu reeves seduces is "not even hot."
  
• "people trusted you and they ended up dead." patrick swayze acknowledges this and then he rides the great wave to his death, because he is extreme.