"I get a laugh outta starin' at darkness and wondering why people live in the light."

[greygirlbeast]

An oddly cosmopolitan day yesterday, worldly if only by way of communication. Spain, Romania, Cuba, Australia, Poland, England. I spoke with them all, little bits of business, little communiques with far-flung places. And I read "Fossil crocodilians from the High Guajira Peninsula of Colombia: Neogene faunal change in northernmost South America" and "The extinct flightless mihirungs (Aves, Dromornithidae): cranial anatomy, a new species, and assessment of Oligo-Miocene lineage diversity." And after dinner we watched Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (2005), but it wasn't the forty-five minute longer director's cut, so now I'll wait six months or so and watch it again, before I render an opinion. Night before last, we saw Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), which is an oddly enjoyable calamity of a film, Bible Epic Cheese shot through with moments of beauty and awe and inspiration. Christian Bale gives one of the few flat performances of his career, making White Moses just that much more inexplicable. Sigourney Weaver wanders into frame every now and then, seemingly just to make us ponder why she's there. Joel Edgerton isn't half bad as Ramesses II, I think, and John Turturro is always fun to watch, but a white Australian and an Italian American are, at best, curious choices to play Egyptians. It's almost as if Scott was trying to piss people off. The whole thing began, in my head, to bleed together with the Coen's Hail, Ceaser!, and one didn't really have to look very closely to see the ghosts of DeMille and Heston taunting us from 1956.

TTFN
Aunt Beast