Films for fall season 2010

My six picks of films that look interesting for this fall season:

1. Animal Kingdom (from Australia)



2. Another Year by director Mike Leigh



3. Black Swan staring Natalie Portman



4. Never Let Me Go based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro



5. Somewhere by Sofia Coppola (who wrote and directed "Lost in Translation")



6. The Tempest staring Helen Mirren and by Julie Taymor (who directed "Titus")

Gastronomy

The NY Times article Go With Your Gut recommends that we enjoy our foods because allegedly "when you eat something you like, your body makes more efficient use of its nutrients." The caveat is to begin with food with nutritions.

Harriet Brown concludes in the article that "call it Slow Food, conscious eating, or eating the French way, the point's the same: eating well and with pleasure is more than hedonism — it's good nutritional policy and practice." Thumbs up for that statement. Now, what's for dinner?

Decision

This is an interesting study on the process of decision making and the satisfaction on its outcome. The study by Dutch scientists showed that "simple choices (such as between different towels or different sets of oven mitts) indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but that choices in complex matters (such as between different houses or different cars) should be left to unconscious thought". Now this new finding makes me want to read the nonfiction book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point.

Read more about the study in Science journal: Don't think too much; On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect; Psychology: Tough Decision? Don't Sweat It.

Turkey for Thanksgiving

In The Pilgrims Didn't Brine, Kim Severson set out to find a simple way to prepare the turkey. After much consultations with various experts, she "settled on a roasting temperature of 425 degrees... started with a room-temperature turkey... the breast tented with foil", and "no flipping, no basting." It's important to have a meat thermometer because when the thigh hit 165 degrees [Fahrenheit], we ought to let the turkey "rest for a half-hour, covered with foil and a slightly damp kitchen towel, to allow the juices to settle back into the meat." It takes about two hours to roast a 12 to 14 pound turkey by using Kim's method. Maybe sometime down the road, I'll need to refer back to this simple recipe. By the way, a fresh bird from the local butcher seemed to be the key to success in roasting for Thanksgiving.

In Quotation

"In this world, there is a kind of painful progress: longing for what we left behind and dreaming ahead," Harper Pitt from Tony Kushner's Angels in America.

"Leaving things open... so gaps remain... so that one has time to look to others who in some cases need time to get to know themselves," Julie Lopes-Curval director of Seaside.

"And it's not a matter of whether the war is not real or if it is. Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact," Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 paraphrasing George Orwell's 1984.