Oh, not much. You?

Well, it’s clear I’m having troubles thinking of things to write about – the curse of having a boring, boring life – so I’ll take this opportunity to note books and movies I‘ve liked in the past couple of months.

Books first. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell won the Hugo award last year (and a host of others), and is sort of a Harry Potter for adults. Not in any salacious way, you understand; just with more adult themes and without the gee-whiz excitement of the Potter books. It’s a story of the return of Magic to England, and is set in the early 1800s. And written in the style of a novel written in the mid-1800s. Great fun, and a long enough book that it will last both legs of a cross-country plane flight. And most of a snow-bound week between flights.

Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell, recounts the author’s pilgrimages to sites related to presidential assassinations and assassination attempts, and is hilarious. While you actually learn little historical tidbits – such as the Curse of Robert Todd Lincoln – it’s the wonderful stories that make the book so enjoyable. The book’s opening line was enough to get me hooked: “Going to Ford’s Theater for the play is like going to Hooters for the food.”

Movies. I saw King Kong last weekend. Very good, and certainly worth the bother of going to a theater to see it on the big screen. Although it's 3 hours and 7 minutes long, it goes by quickly and I never found myself looking for the remote control to fast-forward to the next scene. To be sure, a number of five-minute scenes could have been shortened by a minute and a half, but even then, you wouldn't be taking out "bad" material - you'd be tightening up scenes that went on longer only to show off the computer graphics (which were excellent, for the most part).

I’m not entirely sure that the original King Kong needed to be remade, but this was a worthy remake. I last saw the original on the big screen at a film festival in Charlottesville about 6 or 7 years ago, where it was introduced by Fay Wray. That was fun, too.

At this year’s Virginia Film Festival, I saw Nine Lives. Nine interlocking short stories, each filmed in a single shot so that you get a palpable feeling of “real time.” Excellent ensemble cast: Kathy Bates, Sissy Spacek, Robin Wright Penn, Ian McShane, Aidan Quinn, and many, many others. I think it hasn’t had a real national release yet, so you might be able to catch it in the theater.

DVDs from Netflix. No surprise: I’m an unabashed fan of Netflix. Among the things I’ve gotten from Netflix lately that I’ve liked a lot are the Firefly series, The Fog of War, the Wonderfalls series, and the Jancis Robinson wine series. And I’ve finally gotten around to seeing Sling Blade. But the real joy of Netflix – over and above not having to drive to the dreadful video rental place and wandering around searching the racks for something other than fifty copies of the latest Deuce Bigalow schlockfest – is the ability to see the interesting “little” movie that you’ll never find at Blockbuster and never see on HBO. Here are a couple that I’ve seen in the past month:

Second Generation. Essentially a made-for-TV movie, but since it was made for British TV, it’s orders of magnitude better than American networks’ TV movies. It’s King Lear set amidst Indian immigrants around London, and filled with excellent Indian actors you’ll recognize, even if you don’t immediately know all the names: among them are Parminder Nagra, Om Puri, and Anupam Kher.

Edge of Madness. A Canadian movie, set in the last half of the nineteenth century. A girl who is not yet a young woman is “placed” from an orphanage to be the wife of someone who is a settler in the mostly-deserted Western provinces. Someone who’s not all that good a settler, and not all that good a husband. Excellent dramatic performance in this murder mystery by Caroline Dhavernas (who gave excellent comedic performances in Wonderfalls), and one in which she doesn’t have to hide her natural French accent.