Errata is a web journal written by Robert Davis who has neither spent a night in a ghost town nor pulled a turnip from the earth. He doesn't even know if turnips grow in the ground. Perhaps on trees, like candy corn. Therefore, Errata is a non-commercial project.

Observation #1: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious."

Observation #2: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious" at the top of your lungs. Bring your eyebrows together before you say it. Effective!

Observation #3: Same for books. Even at libraries.

There is a prize for people who correctly guess the thing about Metropolis, Nevada.

Except where the text specifically states otherwise, Errata's vagaries are indicated vaguely and its authors are indistinct in the traditional way of the Internet, except where the authors lay claim to their work. In some cases Robert Davis lays claim to work that is not his own but has been abandoned like so many ghost towns. Except where held presently, fistfuls of dirt are suspended via dispersal, or dispersed via suspension (in the air), and thus their dissolution is their transcendence, or their transcendence is their dissolution. And yet our eyes tear, and our vision is impaired, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that one entity's gain is another's fit of sneezes. Except where indicated, storms shall outlive the clay upon which they rain, unless storms are improperly delimited by their clouds, which dissolve, rather than by their inevitable return. Thus the clay loses, unless the clay is said to own the storm, to use it to make itself heavy, to make itself cling to white garments, refuse dispersal, cake upon the facades of abandoned buildings, and sit like Man [sic] upon the earth where it is pelted by a storm that it owns. In which case the clay still loses, if you ask us.

Some of the above is legally binding and should be considered a mental contract between Errata and those upon whom it acts. The bit about the prize should be considered an overstatement insofar as prizes differ from dirt and prize dispersal differs from dirt dispersal. Please recall that ownership is a weight and, therefore, hope that you do not win the prize.

One day Errata or its representatives will call upon you for a favor. It is expected that you will hop-to without delay.

You may contact Robert Davis by email unless it's about the rock that was thrown in anger. The rock is more properly called a clod. Why do you continue to raise the topic?

22 August 2003

The Other Side of the Bed

El otro lado de la cama

2002, Spain

director: Emilio Martínez Lázaro

The Other Side of the Bed is a colorful, flirtatious, occasionally sultry musical comedy about the infidelities of four young adults who, by the end of the movie, are paired into the same number of couples. The deceptions pile up, and the entire mess could be cleared up with a brief, honest conversation, but like the characters in a sitcom, these folks fear a brief, honest conversation more than death, one of many contrivances useful for someone making a bedroom farce like this. It's possible to make an inventive comedy along these lines — in recent years There's Something About Mary and Y Tu Mama Tambien have managed to be funny, sexy, or thoughtful, or even all three — but The Other Side of the Bed has few virtues beyond its likable model-actors.

A sequence mid-way through where we hear the interlocking thoughts of two lovers as they question their actions does have a kind of symmetry and musicality — arguably more than the movie's trite songs — and the scene mirrors the opening number in which two women sing alternating lines about the yin-yang relationships of men and women, but the lovers' introspection is so shallow that the rhythm is little consolation. There are plenty of silly faces and jokes about bisexuality (actually it's just one joke, repeated a dozen times), but they don't build to much of a climax as the movie marches through the permutations of partners and eventually drifts into the closing credits for lack of anything better to do.

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