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Feeling kind of wrung out...
Feb. 26th, 2006 06:15 pmLast night, Galina and I watched Jet Lag (Original title: Décalage horaire), starring Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno. We first thought it was an old, old film, mostly because Reno was so thin, but when a voice coming out of the television (a snippet of Larry King, if memory serves) talks about The Sopranos - say, was that an advertisement? - I knew it had to be fairly recent. (It's a 2002 film.)
It was an enjoyable film, in a quirky sort of way. One thing's for sure: I learned a lot of new French words (especially during the airport scene where Sergio yells at Rose). And of course, quite a number of usage questions came up, but I suppressed them.
Afterward, I watched Tears of the Sun, both because it was supposed to have been a pretty good film, and because it was mentioned in a recent spate of translations as being a favorite of one party to the correspondence. In short, I watched it because I was curious.
In the end, the film evoked a curious emotional response, especially the scene about 2/3 of the way through where the leader of the group decides to violate his "rules of engagement" when they come upon a village under attack. Afterward, one of the locals says to the character played by Willis, "You did a good thing here," (or words approximating that), and the unvoiced reaction seemed to me to be a cross between "Yes, it was," and "What did it accomplish?"
Realizing that the subject of the movie is far and away "completely different" from anything I've lived through, I nonetheless recall an experience from my first trip to Kazakhstan, where one night I gave some food to a hungry female Labrador who had been hanging around the hotel. There was a part of me that knew it was the right thing to do; there was another part that cried, "So what?" I don't know, maybe that moment - magnified - was the reason the film closed with the display of Edmund Burke's famous quote on evil and good men.
For the rest, the movie was a pretty predictable shoot-em-up, with the cavalry (flying jets) arriving in the nick of time to save the hero's bacon.
* * * I got up early today and started working on the pile left on my plate. About halfway through a letter, Galina calls me to watch something she feels I ought to watch on the tube. I guess it's just one of my buttons, but I really don't like that, especially as it seems to imply that whatever I'm doing when I'm typing a mile-a-minute isn't terribly important.
So, to make a long story short, I pushed one of Galina's buttons back, and we exchanged words, whereupon she got dressed and left the house, presumably to spend time at the store.
In any event, after translating two Russian letters of recommendation, I sat down to attack the pile of French documents. When the smoke cleared, it turned out that two of the documents sent to me for translation are identical (no matter what the file names say), and that two other documents are very similar to each other, almost to the point where doing a global search-and-replace on one term pretty much does the trick. (I said almost.)
That leaves me one document in the pile, which I'll probably start on tonight. The printout intimidated me, I guess, when I started the project, but hopefully by now I shall have taken its measure as a result of all of the other stuff I've done, and the work will go smoothly.
Cheers...
It was an enjoyable film, in a quirky sort of way. One thing's for sure: I learned a lot of new French words (especially during the airport scene where Sergio yells at Rose). And of course, quite a number of usage questions came up, but I suppressed them.
Afterward, I watched Tears of the Sun, both because it was supposed to have been a pretty good film, and because it was mentioned in a recent spate of translations as being a favorite of one party to the correspondence. In short, I watched it because I was curious.
In the end, the film evoked a curious emotional response, especially the scene about 2/3 of the way through where the leader of the group decides to violate his "rules of engagement" when they come upon a village under attack. Afterward, one of the locals says to the character played by Willis, "You did a good thing here," (or words approximating that), and the unvoiced reaction seemed to me to be a cross between "Yes, it was," and "What did it accomplish?"
Realizing that the subject of the movie is far and away "completely different" from anything I've lived through, I nonetheless recall an experience from my first trip to Kazakhstan, where one night I gave some food to a hungry female Labrador who had been hanging around the hotel. There was a part of me that knew it was the right thing to do; there was another part that cried, "So what?" I don't know, maybe that moment - magnified - was the reason the film closed with the display of Edmund Burke's famous quote on evil and good men.
For the rest, the movie was a pretty predictable shoot-em-up, with the cavalry (flying jets) arriving in the nick of time to save the hero's bacon.
So, to make a long story short, I pushed one of Galina's buttons back, and we exchanged words, whereupon she got dressed and left the house, presumably to spend time at the store.
In any event, after translating two Russian letters of recommendation, I sat down to attack the pile of French documents. When the smoke cleared, it turned out that two of the documents sent to me for translation are identical (no matter what the file names say), and that two other documents are very similar to each other, almost to the point where doing a global search-and-replace on one term pretty much does the trick. (I said almost.)
That leaves me one document in the pile, which I'll probably start on tonight. The printout intimidated me, I guess, when I started the project, but hopefully by now I shall have taken its measure as a result of all of the other stuff I've done, and the work will go smoothly.
Cheers...
