Just a post-Kinsey girl who never made the graphs

1. The High Bright Sun (1964) is a political thriller whose necessary premise that the EOKA were a bunch of irresponsible terrorists is rather compromised by the fact that its British characters are almost all colonialist assholes. Dirk Bogarde's Major McGuire doesn't apologize to anyone in the movie nearly soon enough, the girl he's ostensibly falling in love with included, and the script seems to concur that she's a naive little fool for not siding with him immediately against her own family. (She's Cypriot-American, first generation, an archaeologist staying with her parents' oldest friends; when she comes downstairs accidentally into the middle of a clandestine meeting, a fanatic student instantly wants her dead and only intensifies his arguments when McGuire begins to pursue her romantically as well as for the information he thinks she's hiding about a shooting she witnessed. Eventually even her all-but-relatives agree to sacrifice her; their son only helps her escape the hit because he's had a crush on her since they were children; he's shot for it. For bonus deck-stacking, the seeming Samaritan who gives her a lift into town first rhapsodizes about the beauty of American girls and then tries to assault her sexually. Turning to the British for protection at this point fails to feel like the natural choice, however—just the only one left in the script.) Charlie Baker as played by Denholm Elliott is also kind of an asshole, but at least it has less to do with his Englishness than his tendency to drink all his friends' booze and sleep with their wives. He's introduced as a potential assassin, clicking an empty chamber at McGuire with a drawling grin; his first words are "I could have nailed you then, you stupid berk. Getting careless." With a five o'clock shadow and his hair combed straight back, he looks weirdly like Colin Farrell, just beginning his transition from aging juvenile to paramount scene-stealer of the next thirty years. He's onscreen for approximately ten minutes total. I cared way more about him than anyone else in the film. Susan Strasberg is stuck with wide-eyed exhausted pliancy and lines like "Because you love me." George Chakiris is actually Greek, which means he's a handsome murderer. Dirk Bogarde was much, much better in Victim (1961).

2. I dreamed last night my computer died and when it came back up, it had restructured itself like a game with chapters in a weird mishmash of dime-store Western novels and New England witch trials. The Hanging of Dana De Niro. The Burning of Sarah Grodsky. (The latter was being prosecuted for turning into a fox, which she had done. The scaffold was swarmed with sleek sharp-nipping bodies as she was sentenced, a fire-red wave of fur that left nothing but a woman's torn dress and a few smoldering sticks. I don't know if I should be paging Jeanette Winterson or alankria.) I liked it a lot; it was written in a short-sentenced, simile-rich style, even if it made it difficult for me to find where I'd left my files. There was a strong autumnal feel and a lot of wide horizons.

3. Note discovered on my desktop, which I like too much to leave there: "O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) really isn't a retelling of the Odyssey so much as it's a shuffle-and-deal through archetypes of the Depression and the American South using the Greek epic as the configuration. (I've never been able to figure out who Robert Tommy Johnson is supposed to correspond to, unless it's the epic tradition itself. If anyone's going to put this whole crazy caper into a song, it's him.)"

4. I wish I'd seen Matthea Harvey's "Telettrofono" in its original installation, but I am glad the text and audio survive. It is not a version of "The Little Mermaid" I'd read before. Whereas all primary sources for the previous intimation have gone missing, but murmurs persist in the sounds of the sea, and what is the sea if not primary?

5. The complete filmography of Val Lewton at the HFA in March is cinema's way of telling me it loves me and wants me to be happy.

Tonight I am meeting rushthatspeaks for our Valentine's Day Observed. We plan on Mei Mei and the MFA. I appreciate that the sky is not yet pouring snow for a change. Our shoveling situation is complicated these days.