The movie last night was a French comedy, Robot T-0, in which a single mother obtains a personal robot. The robot cautions the woman about her heavy consumption of carbohydrates but says nothing about her smoking.
It’s day six of the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival and I’ve seen seven films – most of them entertaining, two of them excellent. I thought that having to see a film every day – sometimes two – would get to be a chore, but the experience has been quite the opposite. When I don’t have a movie to go to I feel at a loss.
I am a judge for this year’s Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, which opens tonight. It would be hard to find a better time to lose oneself in movies.
The editor of The Spectator, Fraser Nelson, is retiring after 15 years. In his farewell column, he wrote that the magazine pays allegiance to no political party (he wrote “tribe”) but to “elegance of expression, independence of opinion, and originality of thought.” It was the perfect distillation of the magazine’s character, and the reason I find it so readable. But he did leave out one quality: wit.
New Rule for Real Time with Bill Maher: When they run the same show two consecutive weeks perhaps they can call it a “repeat” instead of an "encore presentation.”
When looking for something to stream, Hania will always gravitate toward murder mysteries, while I much prefer spy stories. The other day, reading The Spectator, I came across a column by the English playwright David Hare who noted that Margaret Drabble once proclaimed that “boys like spy stories because they’re about derring-do” (I’m quoting Hare paraphrasing Drabble) while “girls prefer detective stories because they’re about psychology.”