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If you stop watching TV, you can watch at least one movie a day. Then you can summarize them in haiku form. What I’ve been watching:

Risorgimento.
Tancredi married off to
Rich social climber.

Pluck out the feathers.
Beneath it, skin. Take it off.
Beneath is the soul.

Tess tried to tell him
She was an unwed mother.
Angel split. Asshole.

Eccentric teacher
Loves art, music, and fascists.
Gets her student killed.

Wife leaves Cary Grant.
Realizes huge mistake.
Everyone is drunk.

Football player dies.
Returns as rich man. Gets killed.
Wins the Superbowl.

Couple adopts child.
Child dies. Couple unhappy.
Adopts another.

Shrink meets charming con.
Shrink is uncharmingly conned.
Don’t mess with a shrink

Rich toff hires valet,
Valet brings sexy “sister”,
They both go bonkers.

Boy spots movie star
Dives in poop for autograph
Wins TV game show

Girl weds rich old man
Falls for clever younger man
Diana in wigs

Glib talk show host nails
Ex-president. Sounds boring
But it’s compelling

Woman dumps husband
Meets jillionaire on a train
But husband appears

Traffic, accidents,
Revolutions, abductions,
And then cannibals.

Nympho loves brother’s
Best bud Rock Hudson. Hon, he’s
So not into you.

The movies: The Leopard – Luchino Visconti, My Life To Live – Jean-Luc Godard, Tess – Roman Polanski, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – starring Maggie Smith, The Awful Truth – starring Cary Grant, Heaven Can Wait – Warren Beatty, Penny Serenade – starring Cary Grant, I watch everything Cary Grant is in, House of Games – David Mamet, The Servant – Joseph Losey, Slumdog Millionaire – Danny Boyle, The Duchess – starring Keira Knightley, bo-ring, Frost/Nixon – Ron Howard, The Palm Beach Story – Preston Sturges, Weekend – Godard, Written on the Wind – Douglas Sirk.

Woody Allen made two movies last year and Cassandra’s Dream is the better one. It has the same problem as Vicky Cristina Barcelona: the dialogue is stilted, and the actors sound like they’re reading their lines off a distant teleprompter. They talk too much, like cooped-up graduate students. (Is Woody trying to write characters who don’t sound like him? Do I want to watch a Woody Allen movie in which the actors don’t sound like Woody Allen? But that’s just me.) Ewan MacGregor is usually a fine actor but I didn’t believe a word he was saying. The reliable Tom Wilkinson exudes a greasy malevolence. But Colin Farrell—he’s spectacular.

Like Allen’s Match Point, which was also set in London, Cassandra’s Dream is about a murder and its aftermath. Ewan and Colin play two brothers desperate for money (One’s Scottish, one’s Irish, the only family resemblance is their hairstyles). Ian (MacGregor) needs 80,000 pounds to invest in a hotel in California. He’s glib, a small-time player; he gets himself an actress-girlfriend by pretending to be a bigshot. Terry (Farrell) needs to cough up 90,000 pounds or a loan shark will break his legs. Terry’s a decent guy, but weak; he has a gambling problem and he drinks too much.

The brothers approach their rich Uncle Howard (Wilkinson) who makes a counter-proposal: they must get rid of a colleague of his who’s about to rat him out to the authorities. The horrible deed is carried out—the planning and execution are genuinely nerve-wracking—and Terry immediately starts to crack. Colin Farrell withdraws into himself like a tortoise; you can see the waves of self-loathing coming off him. Farrell has always been a remarkably empathic performer—here you feel his nausea and await his imminent implosion.

Colin has appeared in movies that were disappointments or just plain awful; he’s been written off by many as a future star who didn’t make it. With this performance in Cassandra’s Dream and his turn as the brutish but sweet hitman in In Bruges, Colin Farrell establishes that he’s too good to be a mere star. He’s a character actor.

Here’s a new story by Woody Allen.

Oedipus and the Sphinx by Gustave Moreau. Creepy, no?

Speaking of myths, I like the way Sigmund Freud summarizes the story of Oedipus in Interpreting Dreams. This extract from the Penguin Classic edition appears in the prologue to Salley Vickers’ novel, Where The Three Roads Meet.

Oedipus, the son of Laius, King of Thebes, and Jocasta, is exposed as an infant because an oracle had informed the father that his as yet unborn son would be his murderer. He is rescued and grows up as the son of a king at a foreign court until, unsure of his origins, he consults the oracle himself and is advised to avoid going home since he is destined to become the murderer of his father and husband to his mother. On the way from what he thinks of as home, he encounters King Laius and kills him in a fight that erupts swiftly. He then approaches Thebes, where he solves the riddle posed by the Sphinx barring the way; the grateful Thebans express their thanks by making him king and giving him Jocasta’s hand in marriage. He rules for many years in peace and honour and, together with the woman he does not know to be his mother, has two sons and two daughters—until a plague breaks out, occasioning a fresh consultation of the oracle, this time by the Thebans…

The plot of the play consists quite simply of the gradually intensifying and elaborately delayed exposure (not unlike the task of psychoanalysis) of the fact that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius as well as the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta. Shattered by his unwittingly performed atrocity, Oedipus blinds himself and abandons his homeland. The words of the oracle are fulfilled…

My introduction to Oedipus and the Greek myths was via Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. There was a dusty paperback in my cousins’ house, where my parents had parked me in the hope that I would learn to play with other children. That didn’t work, but it got me interested in the classics. If they’d known what I was reading they probably would’ve freaked out—big ick factor—and had me exorcised again. In my defense I could’ve pointed out that part in the Bible where Lot’s daughters decide that in the absence of potential mates their father would have to do.

In Pasolini’s film adaptation, Oedipus is a young man in fascist Italy.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex

Woody Allen’s spoof Oedipus Wrecks in the New York Stories trilogy is the story of a guy whose mother vanishes onstage during a magic act and reappears in the sky to embarrass him.

Oedipus Wrecks

In our Pets Make Us Human series: Alphonso Pfunkiecore’s story, via his human, Jerlen.

I had just moved out of my father’s house (to put it delicately) and was crashing at a friend’s place, feeling disjointed. I had no job and spent most my days scrubbing the floor tiles one by one with a scouring pad for something to do. One day, for a change of scenery, I went out for a walk. Towards the end of it, I passed by one of those garbage dumps that seem to spring out of nowhere and I noticed a kitten playing inside a discarded pedicab carcass. It was filthy and thin, but its eyes were very bright and full of mischief. It was quite alone, and every time a car would pass by he would dart inside the pedicab and cower.

His name is Alphonso Pfunkiecore from (1) St. Alphonsus whose feast day it was when I found Pfunkie, (2) that Parokya ni Edgar deodorant ad about the first day of school and (3) Montecore, the white tiger who mauled Roy Horn. The love of his life is Pacita Ignacia, and hers is another story.

Pfunkie gets a gift from Purina, PAWS, and the Homeless, Not Worthless campaign. Have you rescued/been rescued by a stray cat or dog? Email your story and your pet’s photo to saffron.safin@gmail.com.

In the TLS Peter Stothard muses on a human-divine affair that led to a cataclysm and gave Euripides the subject of his Phaeton, which survives only in fragments.

Writing in around about 420BC, Euripides tells the ever fresh story of a woman who decided to keep her secret and, as an added attraction to the modern reader, caused some early global warming too.

Until, in Euripides’s Scene One the mother decides she has to tell her boy who his father really is…

Then Phaeton met his real dad, took his dad’s chariot out, and crashed it. He did get cars named after him. But is it a good idea to buy a car named after a terrible driver who died in a spectacular crash?

Our Pets Make Us Human series continues with the history of Bucky as told by MLD.

A white Japanese Spitz was loitering around the church one day during choir practice. I allowed him to follow me home after we closed up. We waited for someone to claim him. Days passed but no one came forward. So he became ours.

Bucky has passed on. He was probably around 12 yrs old (he was already full grown when he joined us). He left us his offspring, Winter and his grand-offspring Happy and some of the best memories one could ever have.

Email your stray dog and cat adoption stories to saffron.safin@gmail.com. If your entry is posted here, your pet gets a gift from Purina, PAWS, and the Homeless, Not Worthless campaign. More dog stories please, our entries are feline-heavy.