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lush summer thunder I've gotten back into the habit of renting movies again and I seem to be focusing on historic foreign royalty. Yesterday afternoon I watched Elizabeth with Cate Blanchett and wished that I had seen it in the theater. I remember someone calling it horror masquerading as history and I can see their point. People certainly will kill for power. Since my knowledge of Elizabethan history isn't that good, I have no idea how much fact was distorted in the film. None of this matters, because I still found it to be visually impressive. Of course Milwaukee being the cosmopolitan delight that I cherish so much only showed it at the arthouse theater located on the other side of town when it was originally released. Tonight I watched the director's cut of The Last Emperor. I had seen the earlier version years before and I have to say that the new footage certainly fleshs out the rest of the story. My knowledge of Chinese history is about as vast as my Elizabethan knowledge, so once again I have no idea how much was factual. What struck me the most was the color in the film. In the beginning everything is deep reds and gold. Then in the middle everything becomes gray. All of the pageantry is replaced by uniformity. For a change I went to sleep an hour after I got home. Then I woke just in time to run some errands before the rain started to fall. The weather has finally started to change to a more summer like feel. For the past week or so we have been experiencing forty degree weather at night, but now we are having thunderstorms. Lightning flashed outside my window as I watched the movies. On the home front, only half of the couple downstairs returned this Sunday. She and the baby must be at their new place or with her family. For some reason I still take this very personally. If living here bothered her so much or isn't good enough for her, then why did she move here in the first place. The two of them really disgust me and wish that they would just go away.
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