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Playing catch-up...
Oct. 1st, 2002 09:48 pmI got up particularly early to make sure all the paperwork was in order for this morning's postal audit. As expected, everything went well. I went home around 10 am and decided to watch the DVD that Galina watched last night while I translated, a French film title Amélie, starring Audrey Tautou. I figured if the film was a bore, I could always take a nap.
The film's original French title, Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain was apparently too much for the distributor to accept for U.S. consumption, but that's a small nit to pick. Overall, the story is charming, being the life of a young woman who deals with life on her own terms and finds true love along the way.
She is surrounded by some interesting characters: an old man who paints and repaints Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, a landlady whose husband abandoned her 40 years ago for another woman, a greengrocer who continuously insults and verbally abuses a mentally challenged young man who works for him, and a young man who works in a porno shop and collects discarded photographs.
It kept my attention all the way through, and there are some lines - which escape me now - that make one think, though not too deeply, apparently.
This evening, Galina and I watched Autumn Marathon (original title Осенный марафон), generally billed as a comedy and actually subtitled A sad comedy, which it most certainly is.
I found a number of funny moments in the film, but probably few that were intended by the writer or director. The "hero," one Andrei Pavlovich Buzykin, is a wandering generality who lies so pathologically (and so transparently, to those around him) that one wonders why (or how) a story could be woven around him.
He apparently is a translator from English into Russian and teaches translation at an institute, for which we can all give three cheers. However talented the man may be linguistically, his personal life is a disaster. It gets to the point where neither his wife nor his mistress believe anything he says, even when he gets involved in things that keep him away from both, like bailing a Danish professor acquaintance out of a detox clinic a few hours before his daughter and son-in-law are set to fly to a 2-year assignment near the North Pole.
The late Yevgeniy Leonov played, in my opinion, a real starring role as Kharitonov, a guy who lives a few apartments down who drops by looking for a partner to drink with and go mushroom hunting with. He distills the stereotype down to its essentials, and the result is not at all bad.
And I felt sorry for Alla, the mistress, who was portrayed as really and truly being head-over-heels in love with the heel Buzykin, who ended up listening to a dead receiver in a good dozen or so phone conversations, and who had all the backbone of a week-old decomposing jellyfish.
So, whereas it was basically one for three for my first three Netflix choices, it's been two for three for this triplet. Not too bad.
* * * Another handful of pages bit the dust today; 13 left. I'll probably have them all delivered by the end of the day on Thursday. The current safety manual is on a subject I have some direct experience with: boilers. Having worked on my share of boiler startups, reading the safety procedures is pretty straighforward, if a little surprising, seeing how approaches differ and how they resemble one another with regard to the same basic steps (e.g., lighting off burners).
In other news: wonder of wonders, the client who habitually has paid late (i.e., 45 days and over) paid a fairly large invoice on time. I've also been informed, by client L in California, that I am on the team for Baikonur, but that everyone is waiting for the security clearances to come through, after which, I guess, the dates will be finally decided. Based on that e-mail, I've put off registering for the ATA conference in Atlanta in early November; should the trip be called off, I'll have to pay a little more to register, but that's what I decided.
It's getting late. I think I will hit the hay soon and get up early and do a few pages bright and early in the morning (something that has not happened these past couple of days).
Cheers...
The film's original French title, Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain was apparently too much for the distributor to accept for U.S. consumption, but that's a small nit to pick. Overall, the story is charming, being the life of a young woman who deals with life on her own terms and finds true love along the way.
She is surrounded by some interesting characters: an old man who paints and repaints Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, a landlady whose husband abandoned her 40 years ago for another woman, a greengrocer who continuously insults and verbally abuses a mentally challenged young man who works for him, and a young man who works in a porno shop and collects discarded photographs.
It kept my attention all the way through, and there are some lines - which escape me now - that make one think, though not too deeply, apparently.
This evening, Galina and I watched Autumn Marathon (original title Осенный марафон), generally billed as a comedy and actually subtitled A sad comedy, which it most certainly is.
I found a number of funny moments in the film, but probably few that were intended by the writer or director. The "hero," one Andrei Pavlovich Buzykin, is a wandering generality who lies so pathologically (and so transparently, to those around him) that one wonders why (or how) a story could be woven around him.
He apparently is a translator from English into Russian and teaches translation at an institute, for which we can all give three cheers. However talented the man may be linguistically, his personal life is a disaster. It gets to the point where neither his wife nor his mistress believe anything he says, even when he gets involved in things that keep him away from both, like bailing a Danish professor acquaintance out of a detox clinic a few hours before his daughter and son-in-law are set to fly to a 2-year assignment near the North Pole.
The late Yevgeniy Leonov played, in my opinion, a real starring role as Kharitonov, a guy who lives a few apartments down who drops by looking for a partner to drink with and go mushroom hunting with. He distills the stereotype down to its essentials, and the result is not at all bad.
And I felt sorry for Alla, the mistress, who was portrayed as really and truly being head-over-heels in love with the heel Buzykin, who ended up listening to a dead receiver in a good dozen or so phone conversations, and who had all the backbone of a week-old decomposing jellyfish.
So, whereas it was basically one for three for my first three Netflix choices, it's been two for three for this triplet. Not too bad.
In other news: wonder of wonders, the client who habitually has paid late (i.e., 45 days and over) paid a fairly large invoice on time. I've also been informed, by client L in California, that I am on the team for Baikonur, but that everyone is waiting for the security clearances to come through, after which, I guess, the dates will be finally decided. Based on that e-mail, I've put off registering for the ATA conference in Atlanta in early November; should the trip be called off, I'll have to pay a little more to register, but that's what I decided.
It's getting late. I think I will hit the hay soon and get up early and do a few pages bright and early in the morning (something that has not happened these past couple of days).
Cheers...
