Thursday – 27 January 2011
Another No Bad News Thursday is upon us. This one greets us with sun and the hope of a (reasonably) warm day.

Last night, SaraRules! and I met downtown for dinner at Settebello Pizzeria Napoletana. I had been there twice (I think) before, though I’ve been to Capo, the gelato shop next door, a few times. SaraRules! had the Margherita; I had the Quattro Stagioni, which was quite good. After dinner, we walked to the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center for our fifth Sundance movie, Perfect Sense:

When Susan (Eva Green), an epidemiologist, reemerges from an affair gone sour, she encounters a peculiar patient—a Glasgow truck driver who experienced a sudden, uncontrollable crying fit. Now he is calm, but he has lost his sense of smell. Susan learns there are 11 cases like him in Glasgow, 7 in Aberdeen, 5 in Dundee, and 18 in Edinburgh. In fact, Great Britain has 100 cases, with additional ones reported in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and they all appeared in the last 24 hours.Although Susan’s encounter with Michael (Ewan McGregor), a local restaurant chef, holds the promise of new love, the world is about to change dramatically. People across the globe begin to suffer strange symptoms, affecting the emotions, then the senses.

This description doesn’t really do the movie justice. While it does touch on the epidemic, it focuses mostly on Susan and Michael, their relationship and how it changes as the world around them changes. It was a dramatic piece with very human comedic moments interspersed through it. I’ve noted before how I appreciate movies that use silence – or, more aptly: the absence of sound – well, like Contact and Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams. This movie joins the ranks of those films in its excellent use of silence.

Stray Toasters

Namaste.