Peter Nolan

The Morning After

Well, the Brit's are ecstatic over Helen Mirren taking the best actress Oscar - it takes the sting off the record-breaking win by Ireland at Croke Park on Saturday.  Also a plus, Peter O'Toole, like his fellow thespians Brenda Fricker and Daniel Day-Lewis, will lose the temporary British nationality bestowed on Oscar nominees by Fleet Street. 

As I'd expected, Al Gore took home an Oscar too.  Nice to see Al win an election for once in his life.  I demand a recount!

A night at the pitchers...

I feel like crap, although I'm still hoping to get out by tomorrow night to see this documentary at the French cultural centre on German writer Ernst Jünger, who was one of the military administrators of Paris during the occupation. It makes a break from the oestrogen overdose  I've been accumulating today from going through my backlog of unwatched DVDs - The Thomas Crown Affair, Dirty Dancing, Ghost and Jerry Maguire. 

Update

I have to concede that Dirty Dancing is actually very enjoyable.  I doubt that many people would have picked up on a lot of the themes, of class and of the segregation of Jews from wider society, as epitomised in the resort.  It's happy ending, the blending of old and new generations in a reasonably harmonious synthesis is probably either unrepresentative or only short-lived.  Baby may well have been out of college by the time "the sixties" really kicked off, with Jane Fonda's trip to Hanoi, the Weathermen terrorists, the Manson family, the PLO, the Black Panthers and the rest took centre stage. 

Gore no more

My review of Al Gore's book and movie An Inconvenient Truth was published in the Sunday Business Post.  It was fun to write, as you can probably tell.  I enjoyed the feedback as well.