Been fighting with Perl character encodings again... RSS inclusion didn’t work – the output was Latin-1. So I delved deeper into the perlunicode and perluniintro man pages. I managed to solve the problem after some struggling, but I think to really solve this, I should move the wiki to true character based Perl, ie. use the following:
use open ':utf8';
Watching *Mystery Train* by Jim Jarmusch (IMDB:0097940). There are some very interesting moments where I felt that it was well observed, but overall too boring. I think my interest in Jim Jarmusch movies which I have had these last days for no reason at all is about to fade. We’ll see how *Night on Earth* fares.
The funny thing is that *Mystery Train* also explores the connections between random people, just like Wong Kar Wai’s *Fallen Angels* and *Chungkink Express*. In Wong Kar Wai’s movies, the two stories are connected via the two police officers frequenting the same fast-food joint, or people passing you and nearly touching. And in Jim Jarmusch’s movie, all three stories end in a cheap hotel and there is a gunshot in the morning. Some of these people we see meeting before – she walks by one of the guys fixing his car, they walk the same mile on the same road, they pass the restaurant where she is sitting inside.
This playing *what if* and *I wonder what life these people are living* is something that happens to me while waiting for the train, or getting in and out of the train. I look at these people and wonder, how’s their love life? Are they meeting somebody now? Somebody in the family died? Why is she reading that book? Who recommended it to her? Did she like that person? And so on... Pure curiosity. This kind of speculation must satisfy some area in our brain specialized on social interactions. Similar to that other area that is responsible for gossip. ;)
Cool pictures of Japanese girls with lots of make-up. ¹ ² ³ and Japan itself ⁴ *Via boing-boing* ⁵.