Twenty Down...

Five left to go. I suppose that missing the Juráček movie on Thursday was a good thing because, as I had suspected, nothing was accomplished yesterday. The two-hour make-up session for Czech fiction lasted four hours. At least Doctor Cz. fed us cake and asparagus. I now have five papers to mark for Monday and except for one that I know is going to hurt, I saved the "A" papers for this weekend. Instead of wringing my brain to comment on the upteen-gazillionth okay paper, which gets to be harder and harder as time passes, (I start sounding like a broken record: "More summary than analysis," "the examples chosen to prove your point were questionable," etc.) I get to write things like, "A. Excellent paper. Your analysis is intelligent and the aspects of each film that you choose to compare are relevant to your argument. Have you ever thought about looking at X, Y, and Z?" Marking should be relatively blissful.

In other news, K. and I rented Kill Bill Vol. 1 last night, because Master and Commander was out. Feel free to now disregard any of my remarks on the Tarantino because I am so obviously not cool.

Kill Bill Vol 1 was fun, it was okay, parts of it were beautiful, i.e. the final sword fight between The Bride and O-Ren, parts of it were undeniably ice cold as soundtrack and on-screen action combined into a music video so cool, MTV would never show it, and I was introduced to a J-pop band I really like, but I don't think I care enough about the movie to give it some thought. Except for some neat tricks, good shots, and sly winks, it's instantly forgettable. Come to think of it, that's not such a bad thing. Two hours of guiltless pleasure are difficult to come by these days. -Zh.