Scotland with Friends and Family

I just returned from my second trip to Scotland (see my posts from my previous trip ten years ago here, here, here, here, and here). This time I went with my kids and my friends Nadine, Bill, and Shirley, none of whom had been to Scotland.

Like my last trip, as well as my trip to Ireland five years ago (starting here), I spent most or all the trip sick in varying degrees. A night flight, exposure to new pathogens, and incessant cold and wet weather has a deleterious effect on my constitution, although I was never seriously deteriorated and started to get well by the end of it.

AUG 15 (Tues)

Our flight was at 1 am, arriving in Edinburgh by 10 am. Turkish Airlines, which gave me a quibble of concern but was actually not a big deal. Personal screens only from Istanbul to Glasgow. There was a small kosher snack box on the flight to Istanbul and a larger meal on the flight to Glasgow, both were dairy and simple.

Europcar had a vast line of people waiting. It took nearly two hours to get through the line, and then I was convinced (correctly) to upgrade my car size since it was not nearly big enough for my purposes. Unfortunately, doing this at the airport was much more expensive. Then I found out that my car had no insurance at all - I'm not talking CDW or secondary insurance, I mean none, I had to buy some, also at a higher rate that having done so earlier. I really thought that one of my credit cards would provide basic insurance, but apparently my Discover Card only provides secondary insurance, my other American card is only a debit card, and my "business" Israeli card doesn't provide insurance. I was given 24 hours to verify if I needed the extra insurance. That meant several more hours on the phone the next day trying to resolve it, and then, when I could not, more hours trying to get through to Europcar to ensure that I was covered.

The car was perfect, at least: a brand new Citroen with great pickup and lots of room, and we managed to fill that room so much that we could not always see out the back.

Driving on the left side of the road is hard enough, but we got a stick shift. I drive an automatic in Israel, and I enjoy driving a stick shift normally, but the stick in a UK car is on the left, which makes it doubly hard. Many roads in Scotland, once you get out of the city, are single suddenly appears, coming the other direction around a blind curve or over a hill. While the sights in Scotland are breathtaking enough, the tension from gripping the steering wheel somewhat detracts from the relaxation.

The next problem was getting SIM cards to work for our phones, another endeavor that took some 2.5 hours of wrangling. All in all, the bureaucracy of car and phones made me frustrated and anxious, which made all of us in a foul mood off and on for a few days.

Otherwise, most of the rest of the trip went well. All of the places we stayed at were comfortable, beautiful, and suitable, although some were rather further off of the main path than I had expected.

Our first meal was at the synagogue in Edinburgh, which was running a small popup restaurant that very afternoon. Most other kosher food we picked up from any supermarket or even convenience store (vegan products are essentially kosher in the UK, as far as I am concerned) or, when required, from specific supermarkets in Edinburgh or Glasgow.

We saw very little of Edinburgh and instead drove up to our place we stayed in Abernethy, a teeny town in Perthshire. Saarya kashered the place and we settled in.

Welcome to Edinburgh

AUG 16 (Wed)

My plan was to spend all day in towns around Perthshire, but after a first hike around the area (possibly the most beautiful one we walked, in my opinion) and a small look through town, the kids decided to go back to Edinburgh for the festival. We heard some street musicians and some bar musicians, drank some beer and stuff, and eventually went back late at night.

On a hike outside Abernethy

Somewhere in Perthshire

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival

The Royal Oak in Edinburgh

AUG 17 (Thu)

Nearly the same experience as Wed, this time we split up more. Tal and I unexpectedly saw some theater, I watched some musicians, Saarya saw the outside of Edinburgh Castle, and we didn't see an improv performance later because it ended up being in a church. Tal wanted to go to a particular performance later that night, but it was just too late for us to stay.

At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

AUG 18 (Fri)

We drove to Glasgow. Along the way, Saarya saw Stirling Castle while Tal and I sampled some ginger beers at the nearby pub.

Our B&B was the Orchard Park, which is a few houses down from the synagogue. It hosts a bar that has patrons well into the night, but the rooms were surprisingly quiet for all that.

Here was waiting for us some items that I shipped in advance: a Crokinole game, copies of Splendor and Tichu (to replace my worn out deck), and the novels Jane Eyre and Anna Karenina (cheap books which I wanted to read and could just leave in the UK if I was overweight). Taking Crokinole back to Israel I thought might be a challenge, but it worked out: Turkish Airlines' policy is not based on the number of suitcases or their size, it is purely weight based. So I ended up taking back the game in a box (8.5 KG), and a suitcase (11.5 KG) which was 20 KG, and the Crokinole board went on oversized luggage and managed not to break or warp by the time I got it home.

Bill and Shirley also took rooms in the hotel for shabbat so we saw them on and off over the course of shabbat. For example, Bill ordered beers for himself at the bar and then decided that he couldn't finish them and gave them to Tal and Saarya. :-)

The Griffnock and Newlands synagogue is a large complex of buildings that includes Chabad something and school something. Davening was in the little beit midrash with a hastily set up mechitzah for Tal (and another woman who joined later). My hosts were the same lovely couple that hosted Rachel and me ten years ago, and they were just as lovely as last time. I brought gifts for them, but realized that I could not bring them along on shabbat since there is no erev. So I dopped them off on their door on Sunday morning.

Sampling ginger beers

AUG 19 (Sat)

Davening was in the main sanctuary, and there was some scotch at the kiddush after (although you had to search for it, since the first wave was scooped up very quickly).

Later in the afternoon a BGGer (Michael Ross) and his wife joined us for games at the hotel. He taught me how to play Sushi Go, which is like 7 Wonders lite but so much easier. And Tal and I taught them how to play Tichu, an entire game of which took around 12 rounds or more. We had to play in the noisy bar, for lack of a better, quieter space. Michael also ordered one too many ciders, one of which Tal was happy to drink. Thank you so much Michael, and I'm sorry we couldn't reciprocate (it being shabbat). Eventually we decided to end the game session after if became even noisier.

Bill, Shirley, and Tal made an attempt to pop over to Edinburgh to see the show she missed on Thurs, but it was not to be (too late).

AUG 20 (Sun)

First stop was the kosher shopping we needed for the week.

We headed out toward the Crieff Highland Games. The Highland Games are a series of days of sport, music, and dance events held in different towns in Scotland throughout the summer. This is the one which was most accessible to us at this point in out trip. The sporting events were not interesting to us (yes, that's really a guy in a kilt throwing a large ball at the end of a rope). The bagpipe regimens were usually a ways off in the middle of the arena, although sometimes that came close enough to snap a picture. Meantimes, there were various craft booths around the edges which were fun to look at, some dancing competitions going on, and a different stage with other musicians, one of which was a nice band playing Scottish influenced pop/rock music hoping to have a hit record (so it would seem).

Saarya used his portable stove to cook and make tea during some of our longer drives.

We slept at a beautiful place on the shore of Loch Rannoch, the downstairs of a couple that lived upstairs. It was a pity that we could not stay longer.

Bagpipes at the Crieff Highland Games

Bagpipes at the Crieff Highland Games

Music at the Crieff Highland Games

Audience dancing at the Highland Games

Saarya makes tea

Outside our Rannoch lodge

AUG 21 (Mon)

We started the day with a little rowing in the couple's rowboat. Then we headed leisurely up to Inverness though Pitlochry, somehow taking the entire day to get there. We were not impressed with Pitlochry, as all of the stores were basically chain stores with tourist goods. The best of these is Mountain Warehouse, which at least has very pleasant store personnel and numerous items on sale.

Tal ran into the parents of a friend of hers, also on vacation. We took a tour of the Blair Athol distillery, a brand of Bell's. Their single malt is pretty good.

We wandered Inverness and saw a young, talented street performer who was playing (at about 8 pm) to an empty street. Tal sang a duet with him (of an Ed Sheeran song). We picked up Nadine at the Inverness airport and drove to arrive very late to our cottage on a farm north of Inverness. It was also a lovely place, and another at which we were sadly staying only one night.

Tal and Saarya in a boat

Birches in Scotland

Saarya makes omelets

Busker in Inverness

Tal sings in Inverness

AUG 22 (Tue)

The four of us drove across Scotland from Inverness to Skye, which has lovely scenery, although not as nice as the scenery on Skye or on the way from Skye to Glasgow (such as you find in Glencoe).

Our place was in Eglol, which is one of the nicest places on Skye with a view of the Cuillins mountain range and close to the sea. It is also 15 miles and a tense 30 minute drive south of the main road along a twisting single lane track.

After the exhausting drive, I was too tired to go back up that road and down another promontory (and then back again) to hear music at the Skye festival, which was in our plan. Instead we kashered the place and looked at the sheep that kept wandering around our house.

We played Crokinole.

Residents of Skye

The Cuillins from our house in Elgol

Crokinole and whiskey

AUG 23 (Wed)

In the morning Nadine and I took the five minute drive to the harbor, which was also pretty and next to a small store with local crafts and various goods. It is also the community hall which holds meetings, weddings, and funerals.  There were lines of cars are the harbor, with cows standing between them (parked at the harbor, I guessed).

Nadine and Saarya wanted to see the Talisker distillery. I strongly considered staying put, but in the end I went while only Tal stayed behind. There were no tours available at the distillery (you had to book in advance), but we saw some of the island.

Sunset over Elgol harbor

Elgol harbor that morning

Falls on Skye

Somewhere in Skye

What's your damage, heather?

Heather

Heather

Heather

Stream on Skye

Sunset over Elgol harbor

AUG 24 (Thu)

We all drove to Portree. Portree caters to tourists, but the stores were not chain stores like the ones in Pitlochry but stores selling local Skye goods mostly, which was nice. One particularly nice store sells batiks, and gave me a free cup of tea. The woman comes from Sri Lanka and I bought some of her curry spice mixtures.

We then drove north and looped around the island. I wanted to see Quiraing, hearing it was beautiful, and it was, but I couldn't find the place to walk so we just looked around a bit. In the end, we saw much of the island (just not the Cuillins). We also shopped for the next few days in Broadford.

British boy's magazines from the 1960s

Portree harbor

Quiraing

Flower on Skye

Heather

AUG 25 (Fri)

We took the ferry from Armadale to Mallaig, a trip that you have to book in advance (and I had done so already back in February). First we saw some lovely paintings by a talented artist Pam Carter, right near a little store that sells its own whiskey blends (not sure if it was the Torabhaig, doesn't look like the right place).

We drove down through Acharacle, a promontory of Argyle, south of Skye and east of Mull, to the self-catering house we rented for the six of us for the week. It was right on the beach, again pretty far away from civilization, nestled among a few other houses. Gorgeous house, suitable for us. Kashered everything again. A pine marten came to visit us the moment we arrived.

Bill and Shirley arrived with the next week of kosher food. Since they arrived later than they had hoped to, and knew they would, some of the food was pre-cooked. We still cooked some of our own food and has a pretty little shabbat on the coast, watching the tide go in and out (which was very visible, hiding or exposing a good thirty or forty feet of shoreline.

Morning loch

Tal on a ferry

Sunart loch

At Sunart loch

Sunart loch

Somewhere in Acharacle

Pine martin outside our window

AUG 26 (Sat)

Shabbat on the shore. I read a lot of Jane Eyre.

AUG 27 (Sun)

Bill, Shirley, and Nadine went to see seals (through a telescope) and do some hiking a little south. I stayed home with the kids until around 3, ad then we drove to Arisaig to find a small hotel that had live music (usually from 2 on Sundays, but today it was from 4. Then I had to wait a while for the beer to filter out before I could drive back.

Bill and Shirley on a hike

Bill and Shirley contemplate their hike

Quartz on our beach

Saarya fishing

Music in Hotel Arisaig

AUG 28 (Mon)

We drove to Fort William. Bill, Shirley, and Nadine again took one car. We met up with them in FW. Some of them went to another distillery. Then they went on to drive to Glencoe to hike, but it was raining, so they ended up just driving there and returning. I knew we were going to pass through Glencoe on the way back, so I skipped it.  We did some final shopping for the rest of the week and anything else that we wanted to bring home with us and returned to our house.

On Acharacle

In a store display in Fort William

A monument to someone

Saarya in front of a bridge apparently seen in Harry Potter movies

When the tide goes out, the snails wait for it to come back

Rocks and moss on the shore

Fairy tower on the shore

AUG 29 (Tue)

We drove west. First we stopped at the Ardnamurchan distillery to peek around. It's a new distillery still making their first batches, but they sold whiskey from their sister distillery, Adelphi. Then we stopped to traipse around a high point of the area, wandering around the heather and tall grass for a while. Then we stopped in Kilchoan and nearby, and finally went to the Ardnamirchan lighthouse, the most Westerly spot on the Scotland mainland. Bill and Shirley managed to get two flat tires from sharp rocks when pulling over to the side of the road at one point. We had to use various phone and Internet tricks to get service from their rental company, but he showed up soon enough.

Morning in our cottage

Hiking up a hill

Lunch

Hiking up a hill

View from the hill

The Ardamurchan lighthouse

The Ardamurchan lighthouse foghorn

AUG 30 (Wed)

I refused to drive anywhere for one day. Bill and Shirley left early for the rest of their trip (Skye), leaving the four of us. The three of them went out to look at seals again while I tried unsuccessfully to check in to our flights.

Tal in the driveway

There were endless hours of coverage about the 5 and then 19 people who died in the Houston storms, but I found the text on the bottom of the screen, and its total lack of news coverage, kind of unsettling.

Fog over our loch

Fog over our loch

Single track roads

AUG 31 (Thu)

We spent most of the day traveling, taking over 4 hours to get to Edinburgh. Stopped briefly in Glencoe to take pictures, and then we had to return the car, check in and fly out. My headphones never worked well enough to watch any movies on the flights, so I didn't see anything new.

We arrived in Israel at 4:00 am. Yay!

Pictures to follow.

Movie Reviews: Spider-man: Homecoming, The Beautiful Fantastic, Gifted, Paterson, Primer

Spider-man: Homecoming: Another in the long list of passable and entertaining but ultimately unimportant Marvel movies. Tobey Maguire set the standard for the Spider-man role in 2002 and 2004; Tom Holland doesn't quite live up to that standard, but he does a decent job. Tom's Peter Parker is more child-like and less complex, a flat two-dimensional comic character compared to Tobey's rich and conflicted adolescent, but that is more to do with this movie's director and team of Marvel-assembled writers (six of them) versus the better director and single author of the earlier movies.

Slightly better is Michael Keaton's Vulture villain, who steals the screen every time he's around. With a little more character development - some more family time or father-daughter bonding - he could have been one of Marvel's rare, fully-fleshed characters. He gets awful close. I almost cared about him. As for everyone else, they are occasionally funny or emotive but ultimately one-dimensional plot points to serve as backdrop.

The plot works well within the movie, but not quite as well within the Marvel continuity: Vulture is collecting the energy materials left behind after The Avengers and selling them on the black market (we here about the sales, but not much about the effect of these sales). Peter is 15 years old, but jazzed up after having been called to be part of the incredibly dangerous fight against Captain America in Captain America: Civil War, and now thinks of himself as interning for Iron Man in the hopes of being made a full avenger. Iron Man wants him to just stick to his local neighborhood until he gets older - which doesn't make much sense, since he called him up to fight Captain America, for goodness sake. Of course, Peter encounters Vulture and tries to prove himself, takes a beating, earns Iron Man's wrath, gets his gun and badge taken away, but decides to solve the case on his own (excuse me, I seem to have mixed this movie up with every cop movie, ever).

The special effects are hum-drum for this kind of movie. In particular I don't like Peter's "suit", which is basically a copy of Iron Man's (given to him by Iron Man) with computer vision, a talking computer, etc etc. It doesn't have Iron Man's armor, but that doesn't seem to matter, since Spidey is invulnerable to any kind of punishment (like every other damn superhero), so he is basically Iron Man light. If there's one thing that makes a superhero movie good, it's when the hero's powers and surrounding characters are limited and markedly different from the other ones'. This movie fails in this regard, big time.

But, continuity and unoriginality aside, there is nothing else remarkably wrong with the movie. The contained plot flows, some scenes are tense, some are ridiculous (I'm sorry, but holding a boat together after it is split into two parts won't stop it from sinking). The scenes where Spider-man and Vulture encounter each other out of costume and each comes to realize who the other one is are done well.

Roughly on par with Captain America: Winter Soldier.

The Beautiful Fantastic: A deliberately quirky movie, pleasant and enjoyable, not too deep. Imagine the heroine of Amelie with a less challenging set of obstacles to overcome.

Bella (Jessica Brown Findlay) is a librarian and an aspiring children's author who lives in a small flat where she is responsible for keeping up the garden, but doesn't. She is faced with eviction unless she overhauls the garden by herself in thirty days. She is too poor to pay anyone (how she acquires and pays for the supplies is not dealt with). The cantankerous old, possibly ill widower next door neighbor is the one who ratted on her. This widower employs a gay (gayish?) young cook, Vernon, but treats him poorly, so the cook quits and decides to cook for Bella instead, who can't pay him, but somehow the widower continues to pay him and Vernon continues to cook for the widower so long as he doesn't have to deal with him on a daily basis. The widower eventually gives Bella a little advice. Also, Bella is interested in this odd young clockwork inventor fellow, who may also be interested in her.

The thing is ridiculously contrived and its premise exists to provide scenes of gardening and the main characters intermingling in humorous or wistful fashion. It's not a brilliant script, but it has its moments. It's ponderous with metaphor, but it's never mean and it's pleasant and fun to watch. The acting and photography are nice. A sweet little diversion.

Gifted: A beautiful, intelligent, and heartfelt movie, something like Proof crossed with My Sister's Keeper.

Chris Evans is Frank, who is raising his insanely gifted niece who was left in his living room as a baby by his insanely gifted sister after she committed suicide in his bathroom. The sister's intentions become slightly clearer as the movie progresses; however, Frank a) has given Mary, who is now 6 years old (McKenna Grace), access to enough mathematical reading material for her to already be well into advanced PhD level mathematics and b) is trying to send her to first grade in a normal school where the kids her age are learning basic arithmetic in the hopes of her having a more normal childhood than his sister. (It's not clear to me what he's been doing with the child until the movie starts.)

Frank lives a spartan life, and his mother, though she loves Frank, thinks the combination of a one room house and inadequate education is going to rob Mary of the chance to solve the same great proof that her daughter was working on. But Frank blames himself and his mother for his sister's suicide.They go to court to figure out who the girl should live with (again, it's not clear why the mother waited until now to make this move; and FYI, the father is basically out of the picture.)

If you overlook the two niggling questions above, it is wondrous to see McKenna (who is actually 11) act with such poise and emotion. Much of the movie is just watching a smart kid try to deal with her broken family, her loving uncle and his protective friend (Octavia Spencer), and the idiot children who inhabit her world, while the other parts are a courtroom drama without any bad guys and without any clear path to happiness for anyone. It's touching and emotional, funny and suspenseful.

Worth seeing.

Paterson: This is a very unambitious movie by Jim Jarmusch, starring Adam Driver as an unpublished poet named Paterson who drives a bus in Paterson, NJ. He has a girlfriend who doesn't do anything but paint everything in the house in black and white patterns but who wants to play guitar. Every day, Paterson wakes up, goes to work, drives a bus, walks a dog, drinks a beer in a bar, comes home, and straightens his mailbox. He steals time to write poems and he hears other people talking about their lives.

I know this because five repetitions of this is the first hour of the movie, after which I'm afraid I gave up. After I gave up I read the synopsis on Wikipedia and discovered that something slightly interesting happens a little after I gave up, and then nothing happens again, a little like Old Man and the Sea but less intense and less literate.

Everyone does a lovely job acting, and the directing and cinematography are all well done, and admittedly that's a nice thing to see. The only uplift in the movie comes from the four poems written for the movie by Ron Padgett; like the movie, they seem a little dull at the start but, unlike the movie, they display flashes of beauty as they progress. This wasn't enough to keep me watching, unfortunately. Maybe I was in a bad mood when I watched it. I just think there needs to be a little more there, there.

If you want to hear from the poet and how he came to be involved with the movie, click here.

Primer: This 2006 movie is probably the definitive focus on time travel for time travel's sake movie. It tells the story of two guys who are working on various chemical/material engineering projects, when they discover that they have invented a time travel box (it's a complicated explanation of waves that travel back and forth between tie periods). They then have various reactions to it: they go back in time and make money by betting on stocks that they know will go up, and eventually have a falling out about whether to continue using the box(es). Like later movies, such as Inception and Interstellar, the movie takes the math seriously enough to try to explain the paradoxes.

The movie looks like it was shot with a budget of a few thousand dollars, but the camera work is good enough for what it's trying to do, although it looks grainy and dark. The acting is fine. The script is ... well, it starts off with techno jumble that was easy enough for me to understand, but as it gets close to the end I just got lost, After reading up on the explanation, I can say that it does make sense, but it seems like they deliberately make it impossible to follow on screen.

More of a curiosity piece than an enjoyable movie. At least it wasn't bad and annoying.

Second Draft of the Book Done

Yay. And less than a year after the first draft.

Third draft means a) getting it edited, b) adding sources for and backing up all of my wild claims, c) adding any important arguments or information from the sources that I noted but forgot to include, and d) adding material anywhere my editors say to, as well as eliminating duplication or restructuring as necessary.

Fourth draft will be to pretty the book up with pictures and games.

Editors? Publishers?

Yehuda

Movie Reviews: Wonder Woman, Logan, Personal Shopper, Pirates of the Caribbean 5, Jane Eyre BBC (2006)

Wonder Woman:  Gal Gadot stars as Wonder Woman (aka Diana aka Diana Prince) in the first good DCEU movie. Unlike the last DCEU movies that were filled with grim, grit, and sadness, this film mixes the grimness with as much high popping fun, action, and even a little introspection about the good guys.

The movie is lovingly shot and detailed, with great settings and a large cast of background characters, at least some of whom sport two dimensional characters instead of the usual one dimensional. There are some assorted tokens of various races, but they are not caricatured. WW is not just a cardboard cutout of every other hero with a simple quirk of personality. She is another being altogether.

The plot: WW is created out of clay but somehow also the daughter of Zeus. She is raised on a secret island paradise of Amazon warriors and eventually trains to be the best, not only because some of her guardians believe that Ares will return to eradicate mankind and kill her, but because she has special powers that she keeps uncovering by accident.

Outside the island it is WW1 (a departure from the original mythos). Enter Steve Trevor in a downed plane, a British spy who stole a German cookbook for poison gas, followed by nasty Germans. The Amazons experience some real losses, but rather than do anything about it (um, wasn't that their entire purpose??) they waffle, so Diana rescues Steve, convinced that Ares has returned and it is up to her to stop him. Cue a lot of fish out of water scenes, as well as badass fearless and fearsome fighting woman scenes, as Steve rallies a cast of misfits to try to attack the German gas manufacturing base.

Gal owns the character of Wonder Woman, and in fact just about everyone does a fine acting job. The shooting and directing are lovely. There is time for some actual character moments between fighting - not a great amount, but some - and even some of the fighting is original - although a lot isn't. The breaths of sunshine and exuberant camaraderie enabled me to endure and even appreciate some of the longer fighting scenes.

Wonder Woman succeeds in something that Thor and Loki in the Marvel movies never did: she actually comes off looking like a demigod, rather than a petulant clumsy tough guy who is hard to hurt. And that's something new and refreshing.

But there are a few problems, at least for me. The movie's characters are still pretty lightweight, because the script is afraid to go into too much depth without another action scene. The movie's message seems to be that we are all equally evil or good or a mix, and tries not to take sides in WW1. Really? I think, just sometimes, you can take sides. Simultaneously and paradoxically, WW kicks the crap out of - and kills - German soldiers like they are meaningless video game characters, which contradicts her character and the previous problem. This story is a bit of a disservice to the veterans of WW1 who were not simply fighting Germany because they - or the Germans - were under mind control. And, when the war was over, we didn't all suddenly realize how much we all loved each other. So it is morally wishy-washy, not to mention possibly going to leave children pretty confused about what actually happened in WW1.

And, if WW1 was so bad, where was WW during WW2? Went back to her island to take a nap?

Anyway, you can try to suspend these problems and enjoy the movie. It's about on par with Iron Man in my mind, which is a good, solid comic book movie. Not on par with the great movies, such as The Dark Night or Terminator 2, but solid and enjoyable. Actually makes me want to see Justice League.

Logan: This is the second of the new R-rated Marvel movies, the other one being the shallow, violent, and insipid Deadpool. I'm well aware that Deadpool is loved and was a box office success. It had wall-to-wall juvenile humor, lots of cursing, on screen blood, explosions, punching, big things crashing and falling apart, and some sexy. Whatever.

This movie also has lots of cursing, and has even more on screen blood, stabbing, and limb severing. Worse, the stabbing and severing, as in Kick-Ass, is often performed by a young girl. It is also nearly wall to wall misery and humorlessness.

Logan (Hugh Jackman) is Wolverine, who has lived for a long time and has wanted to die in the past, but who is theoretically immortal since his body automatically heals (aging is cell damage, after all). He also has an adamantite skeleton that was inserted in place of his bones, a process that was uniquely able to be done on him due to his super-regenerative abilities. These include adamantite claws that protrude or retract into his hands and can be used to slice and dice enemies.

Now the adamantite appears to be slowly poisoning him, and now his regenerative properties are beginning to fade; he may actually soon die. In the meantime, he is caring for Professor X, the mutant with massive telepathic abilities who must be sedated since he, too, is suffering from old age: a degenerative mental condition which makes him a danger to anyone in a wide radius when not drugged up. A third mutant is some kind of albino that can track people at a distance but suffers massive skin burns when exposed to sunlight. And apparently they are three of the last mutants alive. It's not entirely clear what happened to all of them, but it is eventually revealed that Professor X killed some of them when his mental disorder first began.

The movie is basically a road trip. Logan is tasked with taking the young girl mutant, Laura, across the US to a supposed safe haven, which may not actually exist. In the meantime, Laura is being hunted. Lots of mayhem ensues.

Logen is not a great movie, but it is far better than Deadpool. For the first three fifths of the movie, the screenwriter simply makes everyone miserable, on the false assumption that misery conveys character and engenders empathy. Unfortunately, it doesn't. It's just misery; it didn't work for the first three DC Comics movies, and there is no reason, other than misplaced loyalty by Marvel fans, that one should believe that it works here. Still, I'll take misery over repulsive juvenile plastic immorality and sick/ugly jokes any day. At least it tried.

The cinematography was well done, and the acting was very good. Dafne Keen does a good job as Laura; I constantly reminded of Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things.

The movie picks up just a bit in the last two fifths, where we finally begin to show a budding relationship between Logan and his young charge. Just flashes of a relationship, which is enough to finally engage the sympathy of the viewer. Not quite enough to bring the movie up from its first acts, because the movie ends and the relationship is severed before any real sympathy kicks in, which is quite a shame. If the relationship-building scenes had come earlier in the movie, and were followed by many more, the movie really would have been something.

As it is, the strong language adds nothing to the movie; in fact, most of it seems as awkward and out of place as Spock's use of bad language in Star Trek IV. The violence is more bloody and more up close, some of it so brutal that I turned my head away and waited for the sounds of scraping metal and punctured flesh to subside before I looked back again. More visceral violence also didn't add anything to the movie; I'm sure people raised on bloody video games thought nothing of it, but for me, pornographic violence deadens my soul. I don't enjoy seeing people hurt, and don't take pleasure out of seeing them die in various ways. Sorry. These scenes were supposed to be entertaining, I guess, but I kept wanting to get back to (or start) the actual story.

So meh. Not going into my re-watch list.

Personal Shopper: After making the lovely Clouds of Sils Maria, the director Olivier Assayas kept Kristen Stewart around for another movie. Unfortunately, this one isn't that one. It's not a bad movie, and I must disclose that it is also a genre of movie that doesn't really interest me.

In this one, Kristen is waiting around in France to make contact with the spirit of her recently dead brother. Both of them believed in the spirit world, him more than her, and she wants to be sure that he has had enough time to make contact before moving on with her life. In the meantime, she is the personal shopper for a fabulously wealthy but obnoxiously oblivious and unapproachable celebrity of some kind. Some kinds of contact with the spirit world are made, or maybe not, and then other random things happen, some spooky, some violent. But these are few and far between the wanderings around of the protagonist.

In CoSM, there was a definitive, progressing story-line with interesting characters interacting and evolving, supported by an overarching metaphor and some lovely scenery and acting. The acting in this movie is good, but the plot is disjointed, the characters kind of wander around in a screenplay that seems to be cobbled together from a few interesting moments and a lot of stereotypical French cinematic cliches (shots of motorcycles and traffic, smoking, turtlenecks, and pointless conversations). I wasn't impressed.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales: Not much to say about this except that it bored me and I couldn't finish it. Johnny Depp provides the only on-screen character and charisma. Everyone else is just a one-dimensional cardboard figure; as a result, the action scenes were like watching building fall down with no characters in them. The plots and action sequences are convoluted and entirely uninteresting, since we've seen them all before, or just about. And there is nothing else there. It's possible I could make another go of it, since it's not bad, exactly, it was just boring.

Jane Eyre (BBC): I don't know if the link is to the full 4-part miniseries, but that's the one you should watch. This is the best version I've yet seen, and possibly the most faithful.

Like all versions, it glosses over Helen's Christian moralizing, so important to the story but absent from any film version. Still, nearly everything else I remember is included, although not always in the right order. The other film versions drastically shorten the initial conversations between Jane and Rochester; this one leaves enough in to not ruin it. The movie doesn't seem like it hurries to get to the action scenes. But it is never dull.

It is all finely acted and produced. Jane really holds herself to be plain, so that you almost believe it. A greatly entertaining visit to the world of Jane Eyre, when you don't have the book about you.

The Period Game: Finally A Board Game About Menstruation?

In 2006 I lamented that there were no board games about menstruation. In 2010, I reported on two very limited games by public health services on the topic.

Now two designers, Daniela Gilsanz and Ryan Murphy, have produced a nifty-looking prototype for a game they call The Period Game: Bleed to Succeed. While the game looks pretty and has received a fair amount of press, the web site indicates that they are still looking for a publisher to bring the game to the masses.

On your turn, twist an ovary and one of four marbles comes out: three are clear and one is red. Clear means move one space and maybe collect a tampon or pad to protect you from a period space; red means jump to the next period space. You also get to read informational material in the small booklets that come with the game.