Syriana

Another rainy day in the ‘Rut. Again our plans of far-ranging exploration were dashed. Instead we had a quiet brunch with all the embassy people and expats at Casablanca before taking a brief, damp walk on the corniche. It’s nice to see that Sunday on the corniche is such a ritual for some families that many were still making a go of it despite the somewhat dismal weather.

On our way home, we got a new membership at this funky little video store. Our friend Ben (who has since gone back to Baghdad) turned us onto it, describing it as a little piece of entrepeneurial ambition by two brothers, featuring lots of bootlegged new releases. We rented Syriana and Land of the Dead. I enjoyed the former, but it was a little hard to follow, especially since our copy had volume issues. Also, the text below would periodically appear across the screen:

I had to set up some crazy audio rig to make it listenable. As Amy mentioned, the Beirut parts were interesting. Definitely not enough cars. I’d like to see it again at some point to fill in the pieces I missed, as I had to relinquish attempts at understanding certain parts of the movie so that I could focus on others. Kind of like in college when I resolved myself to failing Engineering Economics so I could pass Calculus.

Land of the Dead was satisfying as zombie movies go. It had some interesting new ideas, but was kind of lazy otherwise (I guess when you’ve basically invented the genre, as George Romero has, you get a little soft). A funny excerpt from the featurette: Romero relates a conversation with Dennis Hopper in which Hopper is describing how he’d like to play his corrupt overlord character. “So Dennis said, ‘I was thinking Rumsfeld…’ and I said, ‘Exactly!'”

Laptop connected to the M-Audio MobilePre connected to a car cassette adapter in the tapedeck of a “jambox” (as Amy and all the other Texans would call it).

Coda: On the topic of Ben…we were glad to see Jill Carroll released and going home. Ben was kind of friends with her apparently, and had told us the heartbreaking story of her capture when we went down south a few weeks ago.