I've been watching lots of Netflix movies with Cheryl away in Perth, which, by the way, biases the selection to movies that I don't think she would watch.

London Boulevard is merely competent English gangster noir (there must be a catchy term for this), but I'm partial to a bit of that (as is Cheryl, actually).

I watched the director's cuts of Nymph()maniac. Like the curate's egg, they are good in parts (and bad in parts). Very funny scene in Part 1 where a woman (with her kids in tow!) confronts her husband who has just abandoned them for a, well, nymphomaniac. Raises the bar for explicit sex, with valuable gains for verisimilitude (men have erections when they are aroused; who knew?). But has tedious (indeed, risible) literary metaphors. I've given up on that sort of writing, and it's even less welcome in movies. At home in my youth I remember the doctrinally correct movie reviews in The Advocate, the Roman Catholic weekly paper. I'd love to see the review this would have attracted.

Battle Royale is a cult (I expect) Japanese movie that predated the Hunger Games franchise and may well have inspired it. Very violent, blackly humorous, and superior to the aforementioned.

Speaking of blackly humorous: God Bless America. Again, very violent, but it hits some worthwhile (if that's the right word) targets. What person of taste hasn't had fantasies of shooting up Australian Idol and its clones? It even inspired me to try abstaining from the endless trivialities on Facebook.

After all the above I needed something lighter, and found a beauty in Wet Hot American Summer. Very silly, and very funny. Set on the last day of summer camp in a New Englandish part of the USA, in 1981, when Cheryl and I moved to Ithaca, NY, for me to work at Cornell. So the fashions and gym-shy bodies are familiar. The movie is a send up of camp movies, a genre I am not familiar with, but it's easy to see the stereotypes in people and situations. All the actors are deliberately chosen to be much too old for their roles as camp counsellors. The cast is great, and the script is very clever. I believe it flopped on release in 2001 but has become a cult classic. On July 31 Netflix is releasing a series which is a prequel to the movie, set on the first day of camp rather than the last, and, incredibly, with much the same cast, even though they are 15 years older! I am really looking forward to it

Too political for The New Yorker?

Nice article on Robert Langlands.

With my BFF Errol and Pam at Chin Chin. 

Australia's world's highest internet costs are due to Telstra.

Witty and beautifully illustrated Aussie web-comic. And like it says on the tin.

Just discovered Mubi, and it seems to be available in Australia by some miracle. Curated selection of world movies at a great price. I sure hope they develop an android app that supports Chromecast.

Tagger Tintin: painted on my iPad in Paris, with apologies to Hergé.

Cheryl & me with Ozalp & Irene, Bologna, June 2013.