Trou de moviemoire

I watched an obscene number of films over New Year, but ask me to name them and I'm wracking my brain. The penultimate one was La Tourneuse de Pages with Catherine Frot - a French film about revenge. Revenge served cold after exquisite planning and meticulous execution. Added to that was a lovely score of music - Catherine Frot plays a professional pianist,  a magnificent country manor with indoor basement pool set 40km from Paris, and a delicious suspense throughout.

The one after that was L'Ivresse du Pouvoir which I didn't really understand. It was another French film - we'd run out of foreign action/thrillers by then - which was very much inspired by the Elf Affair. Isabelle Huppart plays a Juge d'Instruction who goes after big business corruption, abuse and political influence. A bit lacking in action... I sat through it as it sailed over my head.

I'm now in deep water trying to remember what else we saw. I know I have a bad memory but this is fairly recent history, and it's not like 'you seen one film, you seen them all' as they were all different. Come to think of it, many were not very good which is maybe why I'm having such difficulty remembering their titles.

I was going through a real 'chill in front of the tele' mode - didn't want to go to Nice, didn't want to go out, just wanted to plant myself on my lovely comfy sofa, heating on, and wallow in front of the tele. Preferably with my TWDB. Must be a mid-winter thing - it saps the energy, especially after the excitement of Christmas, travel and accompanying organisation.

It's no good, my memory is still a blank. I haven't even been able to shock myself into memory recovery, or shame my lazy brain cells into activity. No, they are all, themselves, sitting with their feet up watching tele in the cosy recesses of my skull. Try to stir things up a bit and they're out on strike threatening to wipe out the rather delicious memories of New Year's Eve and provoking flashbacks of my divorce years. The buggers.

So, while I would love to share with you my film reviews of the last week of 2009, I'm afraid that's all you're gonna get. The rest left no obvious mark on my conscious mind, so that rather puts them in their place, n'est-ce pas.

The next time we decide to rent a film, we're going to try and find one from the Le Point list which includes Benjamin Button, LOL, La Première Etoile, Neuilly Sa Mère, Very Bad Trip, Un Prophète, Slumdog Millionaire, Welcome, Irène etc. I may even remember enough to write a review of the less obvious ones. Yeah.

Word-fill

Do our brains have a fixed disk space for certain bits of information, and can that space be enlarged if necessary?

I was wondering about this because my own brain seems to have a remarkably small disk space allotted to names of flowers, as you may have noticed from my last post's reference to Bordeaux-coloured ground-covering flowers. Not very precise, and although I had heard the name of the plant only that day whilst chatting to my neighbour who has a much larger disk-space for plant names (he of the immaculate garden stuffed to the brim with interesting thought-provoking flora), I still couldn't remember it when I came to write it down.

When I was at university, I read Arabic and Islamic Studies and one of our erudite profs - a Scot whose nose betrayed a certain enjoyment of a tipple or two on a regular basis - told us that he had reached maximum capacity for learning new Arabic words. In other words, he could no longer remember any new words he came across. As he already had many hundreds in his pocket, I'm not sure this presented him with too much of a problem, but I wonder how many names of plants he knew.

My capacity for remembering Arabic words was, surprisingly but thankfully, considerably better than for names of plants, especially those Latin ones which go in one ear and straight out the other without passing Go or collecting £200. I doubt I could ever have studied medicine for the same reason. Never would I have had the chance to pass out in an operating theatre because I would never have got that far, falling at the first hurdle of remember reams of Latin names. Actually, I wouldn't ever have even got that far as I'm crap at maths and mostly crap at science. I say 'mostly' because I got a 'B' in my chemistry 'O' level, but I recognised my limits in that subject and despite tempting cajolings from my chemistry teacher who used to pick his nose in class and wipe the bogeys off on the back of his tie, I did English instead. We didn't have Media Studies options in those days.

I think the plant's name begins with 'G', and I've concluded that it was carried off by aliens in search of a pot plant without a pot for their outer spacial Mother's Day.