Please welcome a new addition to my blacklist of one-star films. If you asked me, I would have told you that this category included just three movies (Mamma Mia, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Sweetest Thing). But Letterboxd stats list 17 films, some of which I don’t even remember watching (There’s Someone Inside Your House, what was that?), some of which I’m surprised to have rated so harshly (does Old really deserve such a low score? ).
So I could and will revisit some of them, one day, to give them another chance (I mean, I love ABBA music… maybe the version I watched, on a trans-oceanic flight, was terribly butchered).
That won’t happen with the film I watched this week, though.

During this last conclave, many English-speaking people online were fascinated by the name of one of the candidates to the papacy, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.
I can totally understand why his family name sounds peculiar. It was the same for many Italians in the second half of the last century, but most of us will think of a different person.

I had a random thought… I may have been a bit harsh with Speak No Evil 2024 a couple of weeks ago, as it dawned on me that so much of the current state of World affairs can be described by the simple exchange ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ ‘Because you let me’.

Back from travelling, to a more normal rhythm and bandwidth, and with a couple of days off that allowed for two escapades to the cinema.
I will also admit that, while away, I temporarily re-subscribed to Paramount+ just to be able to listen to this week’s episode of The Detective and the Log Lady. This explains a couple of entries below…

People come into your life. Some walk with you for a while, long enough that you change each other - a little or a lot, but forever -, and then go on their separate way. Some people drift out of sight but their path may cross yours again; some walk on a parallel road; you’re not holding hands anymore, but you can still see each other despite the distance, and if you wave to them they will wave back.

The second comedy in a row for the IndieWeb Movie Club, The Castle, is an Australian film from 1997; it tells the story of the Kerrigan family, happily living in a house located at the end of the Melbourne Airport runway, until a ‘compulsory acquisition’ notice from the local authorities prompts the father, Darryl, to look for a way to oppose the injunction and avoid losing ‘his castle’.