Well, tonight I saw the Last Samurai. It's probably the worst movie I've seen in the last six months, but at least now I can say I've seen it. The film is absurdly naive. According to the movie, Japanese samurai were virtuous, selfless defenders of the Japanese people who spent all their time either in military training or practising Buddhism; and samurai live in samurai villages - little oases of virtue in the countryside. I don't think it was really like that. In particular they seemed at pains to misrepresent what it was that makes a samurai a samurai: simple genealogy; not honour or valour or skill or buddhist insight or traditional sympathies or anything else. Indeed if you didn't have the genealogy right, those other things were assumed to be simply beyond you. But it was never intended to be an ambiguous movie, I suppose; grotesque inaccuracy only bothers people like me, and ambiguity seems to be more broadly unpopular.

Well, whatever. Today I worked from home in the morning, then had Yum Cha in the city (at Shark Fin House, which was OKish) with Matt, Andrew and Stacii, and then worked late before going off to Chadstone to see the movie. Matt is going to Roxby Downs to work, long-term, on Sunday; so there's been a lot of opportunistic socialising in the meantime. Yesterday was a pizza restaurant on Chapel street and then cake. Also my car is kind of broken at the moment (well, in dire need of a service).

Last Samurai was such a bad movie. Watchable if you're able to disable your own capacity to comprehend narrative; if you can do that, then it's very pretty to watrch.