Entry 62:

Good morning, Andrew,

I saw the new movie of Les Miserables last night--the British one, with Liam Neeson as Jean Valjean. It was pretty good! You'd like it I think, although perhaps you'd boo when Jean Valjean gives his factory to the workers--uh-oh, there goes the business! The Catholic church comes off very well--the noble old bishop who saves Jean V by lying to the police that he gave him the stolen candlesticks, the Mother Superior who gives JV and Cosette a refuge in her convent. The first half is a terrific weepy, with Uma Thurman looking pale and wan as poor Fantine, victim of family values (she's fired for having a child out of wedlock--to keep other women on the straight and narrow, which come to think of it, is one of Mickey Kaus's arguments in favor of workfare). The second half has some credibility problems: Marius (Hans somebodyorother), Cosette's revolutionary boyfriend, looks like a drowned rat and if I was in his cell I would have suspected he was an agent provocateur. He's always leaving his comrades at crucial moments to go tryst with Cosette (Claire Danes, who plays her as a petulant American teenager). Hard to believe JV would sacrifice himself for this puppy love affair--I gave them two months. Geoffrey Rush as Javert was amazing, though--a pursuer out of Kafka, intelligent and self aware, but insane, devoted to punishment for its own sake. He has an amazing heavy, stone face with the ghost of a weird smile always playing about his lips.

Some interesting reports on surveys this morning. NPR had a story about a sex survey of young men, who (this is a first, apparently) answered questions on their own by computer. Apparently contact with the beloved machine freed them of their usual inhibitions, and results indicated much higher percentages going in for all sorts of things than previous surveys had shown: drugs, unprotected sex, prostitutes (2.5% had visited one--kind of a lot, when you consider these are teenagers). In previous surveys, only around one percent of teenage boys said they had had any kind of same-sex physical contact, but this time the numbers fit the answers that grown men give, when 6-10 percent say they indulged in such pastimes in youth. This survey ties in neatly with one from earlier in the week showing that Americans are more Puritanical than the British, but also do a lot more. What's your cross-cultural view of that?

My favorite survey, though, was the one that compared working and stay-at-home mothers and found that working moms spend only seven hours less per week with their children! What are those stay-at-home moms up to, do you think? Maybe we should ask the teenage boys next door.

Curiously,
Katha