Under the Sand (Francois Ozon 2000) - You'd think a cross between L'Avventura and Repulsion would have at least some minor interest but while Ozon seems intent on capturing or at least recreating some tone of everyday life he's instead simply made movie gloss from nothing and back to nothing it shall go. Anchored by a truly ridiculous performance by Charlotte Rampling, this film displays no intelligence, no wit, no life, nothing but the purest contempt for its viewers.



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Mrs. Walt Kelly & Bill Crouch Jr. (editors) Pogo Even Better (1984) - Walt Kelly himself doesn't get credited on the title page but he was dead by then. The highlight of this book are the 1949 and 1950 dailies (almost complete: parts of the 50 dailies are in another book and not repeated here). You can see hints of the cuteness that would years later become more pronounced in the strip (and threatens to engulf all comic strips today) but it's still pure Pogo. One of the 1950 strips even has a swipe at horror comic books of the era (a worldly mouse points out to a puppy "This is good clean fun--See, the hatchet murderer does all his work in the bathtub--what could be cleaner?"). There are also various odds and ends from throughout Kelly's career but most of it is of very little interest, especially since the editors don't bother to point out any errors (the 60s era historical portrait of a 1943 Pogo is a Kelly joke: the actual 43 character looked quite different).



Quotes from Porky Pine:



"Don't take life so serious, son--it ain't no how permanent."



"It's interesting to know that the confidence of ignorance has not died out!"



And when Pogo is recuperating from an attempt by a fox and cat to boil and then eat him, Porky Pine visits, sits in silence and then says, "We never know who's next."