Well, it's been ages since I last blogged so here goes.
I have lost 46 lbs. in 13 weeks.
I plan to lose another 30 lbs. at which point I will renegotiate my goals and probably continue.
How skinny do I want to be anyway?  This is me in 1972.
I probably weighed about 180.  I am at 280 now.

Wolf Hall

Recently finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.  What a read!  Rich in historical detail, colorful language, and intrigue, you are transported to the time of Henry VIII and his efforts to shed Catherine and wed Anne.  The focus is on Thomas Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey's aide and then Henry's most valued minister.  Mantel portrays him in a more favorable light than that with  which history has illuminated him.  It is also a remarkable illustration of Western Civilization and in particular our Anglo ancestry as an incredibly ignorant, savage and cruel heritage.  There is a BBC miniseries in the works, scheduled to run in the UK in 2015; will we get it the following year; I hope so!

Mentally Ill-fated

Patrick's Day is a remarkably good film about the difficulties of loving and caring for the mentally ill.  Moe Dunford is extraordinary as the gentle, good-natured schizophrenic, Patrick. Kerry Fox is his loving misguided mother who will and does everything to keep him from the real world.  But Patrick is now an adult and a chance encounter with a damaged airline flight attendant leads him into a world of love and devotion he knows so little about.  It's a cruel and painful process as he tries to understand his sexual awakening.  I would suggest that this may even garner Oscar buzz next year. 

Desert Wolf

Theeb [Wolf] is a young Bedouin who wants to be grown up like his older brother  follows him and a British soldier and his Arab guide into the dangerous Arabian desert in order to deliver a mysterious box to a detachment at some distant oasis.  As calamity after calamity forces Theed to grow up faster than he ever expected his courage and determination pay off..  The locations are stunning, reminiscent of Lawrence of Arabia, and the performances are all solid particularly Jacir Eid as "Wolf."

Sergio Leone does the Alps

No, it's not Sergio Leone but it a spaghetti western of sorts or a Spätzle western.  Austria has chosen to submit, for Oscar consideration, The Dark Valley, a mysterious, almost Gothic tale of a stranger, a town with secrets, an evil villain and his blood-thirsty sons.  If you love a good oater and don't mind subtitles, this one's for you.

Mumbles

Keep On Keepin' On is a loving tribute to the Jazz great, Clark Terry.  CT, as he is called by his friends, is perhaps the greatest living [or dead] jazz trumpeter.  He is also an enthusiastic teacher and the film focuses in depth on his relationship with a young blind piano player who understands completely the greatness of the man who so freely and lovingly molds him into a man.  The music and archival footage are enough to make this film but the human story is so much more. 

What an unpleasant surprise

Chagall/Malevich is the story of Chagall's Vitebsk period and his "friendship" with Supremacist painter Kazimir Malevich.  I won't tell you any more of the story because I walked out.  I don't know if it was something I ate but as the story developed I became more and more nauseated.   There is no excuse for allowing such horrible film-making into such an established festival.  It was worse than a high school project.  The actors were like cardboard cutouts.  Chagall ran around with a silly clueless grin on his face.  His students were all ignorant and shallow.  His wife was portrayed as a "fixer," 

a love-will-conquer-all earth goddess that had no idea what was going on around her.  Indeed, none of the characters showed any sign of cognizance.  The cinematography is of the more-color-the-better school and the editing... well, this is why I think I started to feel ill. I suspect there was an effort to create complex characters but the director [now 80] fell well short of the mark settling for fickle, naive and childish.  I think it odd that I got so upset by it; I didn't calm down for another hour and skipped my last two scheduled films.