1.46 a.m. I need to learn how to write reviews. Film reviews specifically but all art-ish reviews in general, really. But till then, for the record:

- Loves of a Blonde, dir. Milos Forman. Beautifully shot. Still camerawork like close-up shots. About a factory girl from the country. The movie starts with her telling her friend about some guy who's given her a ring, some guy who picked her up in the woods one day. A forest-ranger. Married. It's peacetime. Some army division comes to the town -- the manager of this enormous factory asked them to, to please his girls -- and three heavy-set army men pick up the girl, Ancula, and her friends. Or try to; the girls decide in the end not to leave with them. To the woods. Apparently the options are (a) tea-shops, (b) the woods/parks, (c) the girls' dorm. A really crammed squashed dorm. She gets distracted by the piano-player who persuades her to come up to his room by saying that he wouldn't touch her and then sleeps with her. A piano-player from Prague. Milo. She goes to Prague to look for him. I'm telling a very bald and boring story but it was shot in loving detail. The path of a wedding ring rolling across the floor. The look on someone's face, the way they drop their eyes, the way they pick up their cap. I think of photographs and camera stills because there was a still quality to the shots -- but also a kind of restlessness? The camera picking out details. People fidgeting. Oh god I'm so bad at this.

- L'oro di Napoli. dir. Vittorio de Seca. Who is of course very very good. And a compelling actor. Four stories set in Naples. Gets darker and darker; the first two are funny, the third full of a kind of black pathos but still funny, and the last quite dark and slightly bizarre. And kinda tragic. Sophia Loren is beautiful, Toto is a genius. OK no more but it has to be seen. Italian neo-realist cinema. Incidentally also the director of The Bicycle Thief and Umberto Dee (I misspell, but that's the phonetic spelling of the title).

argh.

wishlist item one: functional and functioning brain.