3 REASONS OUR FAILING EYESIGHT SO ALARMS US

From Anthony Lane's August 28 review of Factotum:

"The beautiful joke of “Factotum” is that Dillon is nobility itself. He may also be savage, swiping Taylor off her barstool with a backhand smack, and he is certainly wounded, rising from his bed to throw up and then swig his first beer of the day, yet there is something graven and classical in the brow and bearded chin which speaks of disappointed hauteur; he is like a leftover Roman, beaten up by the places he once aimed to conquer and falling, inch by inch, on his sword. In the words of one onlooker, “You look like you’ve been around. You look like you’ve got class.” Of all the pretty boys of the nineteen-eighties, Dillon has not just ripened most convincingly; he has discovered that the weatherings of age were exactly what he was waiting for. His racist cop was the best thing in “Crash,” and his rescue of Thandie Newton from an upturned car, with the flames crawling closer, has rightly burned a hole in viewers’ minds. A sloppy actor would have made the scene redemptive; he would have smiled upon the woman as he dragged her free, and his enfolding hug would have told of lessons learned. Instead, Dillon was aghast, stiffened with something unredeemable, and he clutched at Newton as if he, not she, had been trapped inside the fire.:

From Lane's review of This Film is Not Yet Rated, in the same issue:

"There is an interview with Kimberly Peirce, the director of “Boys Don’t Cry,” which was initially awarded a tag of NC-17—the mark of the beast, as far as distributors and advertisers are concerned. Of the three reasons given for the decision, the most enigmatic was that when Hilary Swank (disguised as a boy) pleasures Chloë Sevigny, the orgasm of the latter goes on too long. To which the reply must be: How long is too long? Does the notion of a slow train coming, as it were, offend the public sense of due process, and, if so, is that public assumed to be largely and nervously male? Was there something more useful, like ironing or car maintenance, which the M.P.A.A. would prefer Ms. Sevigny to have been doing instead of lying back with cheeks aflame?"

And from an article by William Mullen in today's Chicago Tribune about a 24-year old, 154-pound fish named Bubba that was abandoned (in a bucket) on the steps of the Shedd Aquarium in 1997, survived cancer via surgery and chemo and, despite his dark past and insipid name, was a fine figure of a fish and an inspiration to us all:

"At the time, Bubba was female. Groupers and some other fish may change gender as they mature based on social influences and other factors, and in the mid-1990's, as Bubba grew to become one of the biggest fish at the Shedd, he made the transition from female to male."

Maybe they should have re-dubbed him Bubbo.