I thought about seeing The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada this weekend, but ran out of time. Still, the film was able to provide me with some entertainment. When I dialed 777-FILM to find out when it was playing, I almost dropped the phone as a direct result of the hilarity produced by Mr. Moviefone's pronunciation of the title. Awesome.
In other news, I started reading Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays. She is quickly becoming my new favorite writer. So seemingly disillusioned, detached and dry, yet able to cut to the quick with intelligent, exposed-nerve-sensitive insight into the human condition.
From the first page of the novel:
"What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.
"Another example, one which springs to mind because Mrs. Burnstein saw a pygmy rattler in the artichoke garden this morning and has been intractable since: I never ask about snakes. Why should Shalimar attract kraits. Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none. Where is the Darwinian logic there. You might ask that. I never would, not any more. I recall an incident reported not long ago in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Two honeymooners, natives of Detroit, found dead in their Scout camper near Boca Raton, a coral snake coiled in the thermal blanket. Why? Unless you are prepared to take the long view, there is no satisfactory 'answer' to such questions."
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