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Monday, August 21st

Today, while sorting out and arranging videotapes in order, I found "The Net", so I laid aside the work and started to watch it at once. Even though having seen at a road show five years ago, it was still exciting for me.

Angela (Sandra Bullock) is a genius computer hacker who works for some software company fixing the programs before releasing for sale. Without her mother and only a few friends, no one knows her. Because of a traumatic experience about her father, she has come to distrust people and keeps company with nobody.

One day she happened to notice the existence of some very dangerous program, which could log in the government computer system, and finds herself targeted by an assassin. She loses credit cards, car, and home, even her own identity. She fights to get back her previous life, but the criminals are tough opponents...

The plot seems sometimes illogical, but all through the film it is enough sensational. Sandra Bullock is very suitable for this heroine. She gave an excellent performance again. I think that she should have also acted in the John Grisham movie "The Pelican Brief", which I still believe Julia Roberts was miscast.

All machines are products of Apple; in fact I have never seen MS computers in the films. Bullock in a black bikini recalled me to a scene from "A Time to Kill", which she was suspended from overhead wearing only a black bra & shorts.

Sunday, August 20th

"You are so attracted to A. S. Byatt. By what?" When my friends or colleague students ask me, I have always answered that I was deeply moved by her speech when she had a lecture at the British Council in Tokyo. Today, I realized the real reason. It's her theme.

Through all her works from "The Shadow of the Sun" to the newest "The Biographer's Tale", every time Byatt expressed some kind of writer's feelings, something related to the act of writing itself.

For example, her first novel "The Shadow of the Sun" is a portrait of the artist's daughter as a young woman, who desires to become a novelist in spite of her father's strong opposition. In the next book "The Game", Byatt writes about the relationships of writers and the creative imagination. The main characters in the novel, the sisters Julia and Cassandra are both writers, one is a popular novelist but the other is the person who has enough talent and imagination for the writer but had not have a chance to achieve success.

The Booker Prize novel "Possession: A Romance" is the academic suspense story which a young scholar solves the mystery about the Victorian poets. Also in "The Biographer's Tale" published recently, a young scholar seeks the mystery about the famous biographer.

To turn my eyes to the tetralogy, so-called "Frederica series", the heroin has not write anything so far. In the first book, Frederica was just a young girl aged seventeen, and in the second, she went to Cambridge and makes many social mistakes. The third, "Babel Tower" starts from her intension to flee from a violent marriage and find her way to freedom. I would like to find some kind of writer's feelings, which Byatt tried to express under the main story when I reread this series soon.

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