Really Missing Inaction

OK, so I post to promise more posts and then disappear again.

A few quick hits:
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (dir. F. Capra, 1939): Finally got around to watching this classic. It's silly and compelling at the same time, a kind of political fairy tale. It's funny how the kind of populism at the heart of this movie still resonates in media stories about earmarks, for example. Really liked the shots of D.C. in the 1930s--Union Station, the Lincoln Memorial especially. Oh, and Jean Arthur as Jimmy Stewart's "Girl Friday" (pictured).



Underground, a strange Serbian movie from 1995. A little too much magical realism for my tastes, and I'm sure that the film is chock-full of Yugoslavian in-jokes that went right past me. Clever and compelling in parts.

Collapse by Jared Diamond (2005). Haven't really finished this book, but I've probably read as much of it as I can. It's really too depressing for me. Especially given the newspaper, every day, about Greenland ice, etc. Not a very succinct book--Diamond has thrown in the kitchen sink here, as well as lots of discussion of his own interests, personal history--but worth reading, especially the chapters on societies that have "chosen to fail," in the terms of the book's subtitle.