When Mickey Rourke Still Had A Face

Our mothers were right Charlucci, it's better to stick with your own kind.-- the post dexterously maimed Eric Roberts, as Paulie

I no longer get offers to family gatherings. What I was invited to attend this afternoon, and not attending after all, is a birthday party for my 96 year old grandmother here at Fair Acres. This is where her daughter Mary Worrilow, with her cyborg joint replacements, wishes for me to relocate, as if I need to keep an eye on the vacancy of identity in Pauline Cristinziani's emaciated frame. My father's sister Marie is diametrically opposed to the idea, preferring that I accept my lot here at Riverside, with its understated ideas of significantly abusive minority competency, while I play shuffleboard with the skepticism of a world weary soul. This is an image of Pauline in her ever so slowly stoic withdrawal from her sense of herself, part regal Catholic warrior, devout, unshaken, part peasant, the life she led during the war era makes us look like a group of distressed hatchlings saturated in fossil fuels. The spastic dowager should honor this grandparent in the celebration of a life extended beyond any reasonable meaning. She appears to be miserable in the Fair Acres visiting room, well groomed, hair white and nearly matted, her hand grasping her knee, she bears an appearance of anguish. Septa's route 21 is onerous, from Chestnut Street to 69th Street Terminal, it is damp, and although it would be good to get away, and I would be seeing family I never otherwise get to see, Saturday morning, a spastic colon pole vaulted into a lovely stress attack, ever so slowly enabling death through sepsis in my feces, domineering beyond what we would wish on enemies, presumably--

My administration is reviewing the strength of this ruling. In the event any court damages the #ACA, I will do everything in my power to direct state agencies to protect Pennsylvanians. https://t.co/pVOaLtBkKn

— Governor Tom Wolf (@GovernorTomWolf) December 15, 2018

--unless it's my governor, willfully maintaining the forest of the Commonwealth's poverty-stricken, as careless, otherwise, with the deciduous oaks, still wondering whatever happened to a citizen's self-esteem. And this, too, is an image of John, nearly 60, playing games with his vanity and conceit; it was partly his rebuff, as I've written, being the propeller behind the reason I boomeranged into the inner city in the first place.

Arguably, however, things might have not been appreciably different if I had played my cards closer to home. If John's post-graduate partner, whom I saw once, while they were totally into each other in a slow dance, parted ways with him, or he her,the link I give you provides ample reason why. If I had been able-bodied, with an appropriately toned body, would the demise of what I thought I wanted. birthing his children, among other things, have taken so much out of me that I never loved again? My novelist friend Gretchen, in the interim, faces the possibility of losing her son, Brennan, to an interior brain infection already surgically tackled once. She's such a polished writer that I am living this with her, but it's also why Facebook is anathema to me (and yes, my account chungs along). Even if she was still in West Virginia, I couldn't help her.

My beautiful boy is in deep trouble. He's got an infection. They seem to feel they have caught it in time but he was doing very poorly. Please help Adrian's Cancer Fund. Every person in our family is struggling at our limits, Adrian most of all. https://t.co/jK2LFuMqtX pic.twitter.com/V0MQZb2xB9

— Troy Blackford (@TBlackford3) December 16, 2018

The same applies to my steady follower. If Troy Blackford's plight with Adrian is genuine, I feel for the child. Even if I had the money, even some expertise, I couldn't change the outcome, but this is different in kind, again, from mobility medical indifference beating hordes into a pulp. Those of you who truly believe health care is a right, have no damn idea how you're referencing it. It is certain not inalienable as a pathway to freedom.

Class Reunion

what a glorious feeling I'm happy again-- the musical

My distraught cousin believes I am in bed. My antagonized attendant believes I should be in bed, and I was on the point of going to bed, but the upset apple cart might be likened to the evidence of a high school pep rally pecking order, one which I don’t really have time for, but nonetheless I offered provocation, not at Maxine's incitement level 20 minutes to check out and Galahad rebelled. Rightly so, as I do not let go easily. The consequences fell on my cousin’s head more than my own, as my raw aches cauterized by the end of May, but I had a 62 year old woman wailing she did nothing wrong, why was Galahad mad at her? This is not a feigned attachment. She truly believes my care worker is her friend, and it makes me skittish, how she clings to a working class man she only spoke to once. Even I’m not that attached, and without his attentiveness, even if I did transfer myself onto the chair in his absence, I would run into loss of independence hygiene maintenance, and I’m next to indifferent on the matter, still bound to the temporal order of the world because a deflated ego wishes to save my voice. Am I engaged in that recovery? Only in minor starts, overwhelmed. White collar professionals presumably have a better grip on emotional maturity, and if he knows he has his freedom, he erupts vigorously when I drop the occasional depth charge into it. Why bother? Fighting to reset the parameters of his intimate consolation, I respect that, obey the routine, but cannot pretend continuously that this situation is a cakewalk for me. Being bused some 40 minutes outside my district into Sun Valley in the ninth grade was equally not delectable, and the only utilitarian victory disability activism handed me on a platter was suing Ridley Township to install wheelchair ramps. It never mitigated the culture shock, something which took years, shedding the special education modifier. Bringing all my professional acumen to bear, I am functionally my cousin’s psychologist, singing pennies from heaven while Gene Kelly choreographs the special effects of water vapor. I miss making love, transforming him into a pugilist sparring partner.

Resisting Conceits of Revolving Turnstiles

Is this what you're afraid of? -- Jeremy Childs

James Hamblin makes the usual devastating and classically liberal argument for which The Atlantic is known, in his dissection of Trump's linguistic foibles. It is the type of feature which readers of the old media periodical appreciate. And I am, admittedly, a dilatory supporter of the publication. Early on in my starving vocation, I sent them poems, fiction, like thousands of aspirants, then stopped, and now only pitch to them when I am in a caffeine overdose of brilliant topic effort. Twenty years ago, I would have trusted Hamblin's byline and expertise, but do not take this to mean I can refute or undermine him with the same detail he utilizes to undermine the president. I used some of his same examples to push back against George Will's "Dangerous Disability" column, which trended on social media late last spring, in a more rapid, cursory fashion, and couldn't give it away. This has made me terse and caustic, because I still know how to do what journalists do, but I always have it harder, with a not quite figurative hand tied behind my back. I thought I could break the glass ceiling. I thought I could have a normal self-sufficient life, but no, the assholes in my state look at my age, my chronic condition, and say I have to categorize myself as "nursing home eligible" in order to maintain independence. I am not being off topic. Hamblin undermines himself without realizing it. Septuagenarians represent an expendable class, not that this is shocking. It is biologically easier to have a medical crisis at 70, or 69, than it is at 36, but he is, essentially, making a meritorious relegation of the aged. Pope Francis would certainly cry foul to that. In my piece, I cited evidence that Roosevelt would die in office, and did not have the time to burrow through microfilm in my battered chair to use the examples Hamblin does to buttress what we already know: FDR was a great Liberal, and but for the grace of god, if the public knew how sick he was as a paraplegic, closing out the ambitions of the Axis powers would have been much more complicated.

As a side note, if you believe my militancy is an aberration, who interred the Japanese? None other than the most powerful, and one of the wealthiest, cripples in the world. I cited more examples than Hamblin does, but my point was that whether or not FDR would drop dead, or JFK was spaced out on narcotics for degeneration, etc, we got through it without the merry Congressional nightmare of applying Amendment 25, and we've survived perfectly fine without Julian Assange revealing Angela Merkel's secret plan to conspire with Elizabeth Warren to remake the west in Castro's image, our birdseed perfectly apportioned.

I do not like Donald Trump, and would have preferred Governor Bush or Rand Paul, but the very charges the left deploys against him exposes why liberalism is ultimately untenable: disability is suddenly the hot button, but no one breathes a word about disability law and what reasonable accommodation means, with appropriate support. I may also agree with Hamblin about Reagan. I knew the old stage hand had dementia during his Iran Contra testimony, but both the country and President Reagan still functioned. Alzheimer's isn't a fucking movie. My grandfather lived with it for years before he effectively lost his mind. In essence, James Woods is accurate. Scratch a liberal and beneath their epidermis, ultimately you'll find a Nazi staring back. Cillizza wins this round, chicken noodle soup notwithstanding.

Tough Love

Even when I earned what might be considered a decent supplement under my former contracts, I was never much for speed writing, and have since developed a tendency to over-dramatize when I fail, since I believe my zeal usually overrides the weaknesses any voice has. Getting your ass kicked by an admirable editorial voice has positive demerits. I'm trying so hard to return to established media platforms I'm killing myself with the effort, in addition to revising my resume and applying for five jobs in succession. I am not in full blown dementia, not yet. It is my landlord's power, feeding my anxiety, and my age makes me rush. I want to remind my viewers that this monster has been my only landlord since I was forced, naturally, to vacate Temple's campus. I ricocheted to my aunt's row home, which was unsustainable. I am sure Marie remembers, which is why she out dramas me. I have seen horrible horrible things under Presby's stewardship, and I'll never stop being pissed off.

It may be cheap that I denigrate the current bran-brain that runs Riverside. She cannot fight back, but I never signed up to have management virtually move in with me; at Diamond Park's location, it may have been mildly less pressing, but the violence and destabilization make minority collective stricture, responsibility as a social constraint, rather moot when blacks were killing each other and killing the pets of girlfriends on a cyclic basis. I should not have to evict myself simply to get movement, but this is what it is coming to. For the liberals who want me to mitigate in civil objective speak, I hate Trudy Richardson because she never, ever stops. She is like a cobra. If she cannot humiliate me one way, then she has subordinate Debra Horne threaten me through a terminally ill aunt on Prozac. I cannot keep living here. I cannot, because it will become a self fulfilling prophecy. Please, just please help me leave. I'm begging, anyone. I have no money left to speak of. 

Biagio Cocuzza

Wilder recruited the famous Texan transvestite Barbette as a consultant to Curtis and Lemmon. Barbette ... was now in retirement. He'd had a glittering circus career before it ended prematurely due to poor health.-- Aubrey Malone, The Defiant One, p 80

Columbo's "Forgotten Lady", as written by Bill Driskill, is the only one of the original episodes to veer off the conclusions viewers expected of the series-- and is also one of the few episodes that immediately locates me back home watching it as a kid, not then nuanced enough to realize the regal Janet Leigh was here taking a rough 75 minute opportunity to vainly attempt to refute what Hitchcock did to women in the creation of the slasher genre. While not to be taken as a promotion of censorship, I tend to agree with the old lion's hostility to Psycho, whose legacy can be traced straight through to rap lyric misogyny, that jump cut butcher knife and shower curtain of which we'll never be free. It is an amoral thrill, the master's tease with his audience's hostility to feminine withholding. This is how Leigh utilized her stardom. If Monroe dripped with with lascivious intercourse, Leigh was another cup of tea entirely, despite the fact that daughter Jamie not only exists but carried on, even cheapening mother's legacy. For Janet Leigh, sexual energy is restrained. The pageantry of gazing on her looks and social grace comes first. Her style was the cake, as opposed to the exercise of love in and of itself, and Hitchcock with real malicious portents said "I'll show you," and eviscerated the shields of womenhood so well we never fully came to terms with the consequences, despite the fact that her foil against Falk isn't so much her crime as mercy for it against an aging medical impairment of which her character was unaware. The aneurysm, from which the patriarchy which she removes attempts to protect her, might be taken as a very early warning sign for Alzheimer's, which would ultimately kill Falk, whose eye cancer never advanced beyond its singular ravage which gave him his quixotic facial expression, a humane persistence for the sake of moral sanction, and even prefigures Leigh's end of life battle with vasculitis, with both actors barely making it into this century with any relevance, Falk only because he was beloved, and our nostalgia for that granting permission for Columbo to carry us forward on the back of twentieth century icons sending us off to a new century still trying to find itself, discontent with the price of the modern civilized world much closer the IRA of Hennessy than the other doomsday scenarios that preoccupied us at the time, including "global warming". Both then, and now, the west looked on the Troubles as the localized problem of a dead empire, but those guerrillas of the hot thrillers of my era were more than successful instructors for the turbulent horrors of these last two decades, while those of us who make for the fading Grace Wheeler's, desperately clinging to tarnished capital, are told the best we can do is transfix to the past, with the same passive intensity with which we try to break it. 

Bearers of A Better Age

I finally slipped it on the proper finger, and of course it fit perfectly.-- Michael Grant

By the time we reach a certain age, stories of our mortal arcs become routine: you read one book about a wife watching the husband she lost to cancer lose his hair to chemotherapy, and the only difference a surgeon like Atu Gawande interjects, aside from sub-continent extraction, is the reminder that physicians are just as fallible as the patients they're killing. In this sense, Bill Lyon's arc of decline is something a half century of hearing it may buck. Alzheimer's is not Joanne Woodward's made for television movie. It is my mother's father yelling at me "You have to drive the van!" translating into you have to get ready for Paratransit.

But my grandfather was basically dead that evening. His son, Louis, my godfather, would have been better off shooting his dad in the backyard the day after the holiday. I emailed Mr. Lyon about this yesterday, telling him I couldn't comfort him and hoped it went easier on him than my grandfather. We can take his clinical shrinking and superimpose it into the loss of what being a newspaper man means. It means you searched for Lyon's columns, it means that he represented the working class voice of Philadelphia to a fine standard of excellence, and his example represents what I also reasonably hoped for.

What would you say? That I should have recognized I couldn't handle the severity of my emotional pain, much like my former clients, without committing myself to a lifelong psychiatric battle? I need not remind you, even when I was Jerry's student, being denied her father figure copulation, I had university counselors trying to ease my morbidity by telling me it was "an existential funk". I was younger, more resilient, still able to repress the humiliation which had not yet reached the toxicity of North Philadelphia. The disability center, as it exists today, doesn't know which voice mail to transfer me to, and the fact that Erik's day guy makes me feel unsafe isn't a joke. I have no where else to go, the more functional seniors at Riverside never wanted me here. I never wanted to live here in the first place. Just because Chris isn't going to kill me, I should not be subjected to his belligerent, hostile behavior.

Ideology, too, goes flatline at this point.

In Place of Scurrilous Venom

In reaction to any questionable statement or activity, social media users can create huge waves of outrage within just a few hours. These so-called online firestorms pose new challenges for marketing communications.

I signed up for twitter shortly after the intrepid Kathleen Parker syndicated one of her columns about signing up for it. There is no question as to its utility as an aggregate, no question as to its marketing value, nor its power for social agitation, though if I asked my followers to put an uncouth nigger aide who has been giving me my latest set of housing problems in his place, non-interference then suddenly becomes an issue of proactive removal: no, I'm not asking for that, I made a scene, and the misogynist ape filth wilted like a toddler. I'm still placing the finishing touches on putting his underclass balls in a very overclass vise, but this is where I'm at now, just under the half way mark to 60.

In the historical timeline, twitter governance seems to float on an uneasy median of contradiction, with special rules for obscenity, brands, proportionality of the ratio between following and followers, which, under some bizarre rationale, can be "bought". What is that, a status and prestige issue of some sort? Or tweets get promoted, for a fee. All this hardware, all this wireless technology, and all it comes down to is whose hustle supersedes, even if, for a time, this includes the unexpected combat between digital executives and a resurgent medieval code of conduct (ISIS), with both corrupted by liquidity.

As with much of the old guard giving way, even though I'm an unquestionably active presence on the micro blogger, landing ineffectual, sometimes excessive blows, I have no desire to follow 100k in accounts to get 75k in return, and remain diffident about platforms and coding tools: I just read what I read in people: Melissa is a less aggrandized version of Soon-yi and Woody Allen, her partner Mike nothing more than a baboon whose gravitations are led by his penis for Asian pussy, something which has been playing out between Caucasian men and Asian women since Japan was opened at a bayonet's receiving end. I may have curbed my acerbic starkness, parred it down, but at heart, I basically view Mr. Stiles' tweets on human trafficking as little more than a facade. I haven't been particularly supercilious about it due to his staying power, and of course, modern slavery isn't dungeons and dragons, but as African Americans in North Philadelphia answer their own sense of worth with either fatalism or brutality, like Erik's aide harassing me in public space (I wonder if my family would put up with living with corrupt homosexuals who destroyed careers, only to have to deal with this belligerence, no less), how can I give a fuck about social media's victim badges, when I cannot close the door on my own?

Deficit Apotheosis

"What do you think this place is?"-- Noah Emmerich as Dr. Jenner of the CDC

Since fear of Alzheimer's is basically wasted energy, and Camillieri was spared the worst of slowing brain processes as he hit his eighties, I know there isn't much I can do about it, given my own family history, my bellicose maternal grandfather breaking down from the ravages of senility, my late mother's lapses prior to her sudden collapse, but the close of fifty four years of unhappy regimentation sends me a warning flag about coping with anxiety: Rule number one: If I need to sit on a draft without a mandatory deadline, then sit on it. Remind me of this now and again, in your silence. I cannot discuss the specifics of what I was working on at the end of July through August of 2016, and like any freelancer, after a brief pucker over a bruise, jumping back in, repeating all is not lost, I have a source and did a ton of research. 

I have a draft, in the cloud, transitioned my Word 7 clumsiness to Google's effortless Chrome, but I drew a blank Friday morning om my concluding paragraph; I forced the issue due to severe extremes to which most women with cerebral palsy wouldn't push themselves, and I knew it. The publisher wouldn't have cared if I waited, stalled, procrastinated another 72 hours, even another week. All I would have gotten was a policy byline in a publication I curiously enjoy, and that is all I've lost, knowing better than to query Marie Varenas about whether or not she thought I was demented. Asking a terminally ill woman on Prozac, riding a snicker of exasperation. I linked back to Yabberz Friday afternoon by accident, intending to go to my Yahoo account, and a quick glance assured me I wasn't missing anything. Part of the problem with the Yabberz model is structural: 40 followers often share the same links, and for me it triggered  an adverse onslaught, one from which I am glad to be gone. Twitter is what it is, all of us vying and promoting and being pithy in 160 characters, but we can ignore it when we wish to, turn off notifications. The Hortons adapted their software to this approach, but for me, it did not work, led to unpleasant agitation, much like the Grimes family at their wits end to escape annihilation in episode six.

The destruction of the CDC in "The Walking Dead" was a spectacle condensed, in the ever wobbly line between big screen and flat screen, but it was also a 21st century reminder that technical optimism is also a faith misplaced in the face of catastrophe. If I have now become sympathetic to the ideas the Confederacy thought it had to defend, well, even I'm astonished-- but it was a message. Faith in government is a complacency that can prove to be quite costly.  

The Price of Lazarus

"He's like ice!"-- Alain Absire, Lazarus, a novel, page 101, 1988 edition

There is a price to autonomic function we dread, such as the discovery that Sweden maintains a royal family in a relatively permissive Marxist society. Who knew? Who even bothers to apply themselves to European parliamentary systems when so few of us are literate in the American primary process? There is a political drama on WYBE, fairly contemporary, partially eschewed; this is due in part, to the fact that, in Sweden, a conservative in the American political idiom means you wind up with the Clintons. 

Beneath the surface, the American power couple who've been around too long are scorned by everyone, and everyone knows it, just as everyone knows, come January 20th, 2017, Bill Clinton will have achieved the impossible, essentially doing an end run around the 22nd Amendment. You don't truly believe Hillary will actually run the West Wing, do you? This partially eschewed drama is wearisome, wearing on my skeletal brutishness, its title a pun on the actual Crown Princess Victoria. It is a sequential roller coaster on the political fortunes of  Ms. Elkblad, a woman who will invariably climb to the top because of the glaring flaws around her, villainous political advisers, wife beaters. That segment, the Regiscide, the dowager mostly skipped. The Swedish actor cast, a credible veteran, is many things, but a wife beater, no.

However, one never knows about these things, and "The Sacrifice" became relevant out of nowhere. One of the prominent ministers in the social democratic run has Alzheimer's, and she's a secular Jewish liberal to boot, a group which loves to dictate its moral values to hedonists playing dangerous games, and of a sudden, the spastic dowager is caught with her pubic hair in her zipper as European drama serves up a Ronald Reagan dish. All the sudden I mind the mentor of Sweden's perky little idealist, Charlotte, mind the wound of the fundamental unfairness of a woman denied her turn.

Tribunes

"In recent years the star, suffering from Alzheimer's, revealed he was lonely."--Sara Malm

Policy analysts should respect foreign film releases as predicates, and The Horsemen is one of those which might have served as a bolt pistol extension to the brain of the 43rd president, not that our 44th is on much more hallowed ground.

One can understand Omar's vast plateau of superstardom as not contradictory to his loneliness. Who might have ameliorated that loneliness? Would primarily Caucasian westerners have braved the latter day Nubian people in their sciatic dissipation to comfort him? One of his earlier roles, little discussed, perhaps because the film was badly made, not willing to address its own implications, was as the Spanish priest in Behold A Pale Horse, about the residue of Franco's victory. Everything is over by this time-- the time of the film-- though Vietnam was still brewing in the kettle while this black and white docu-drama was assembled, and Omar's character escapes with his life. Peck's Republican partisan doesn't kill him, and the fascist forces are reluctant to antagonize the Catholic Church, giving Sharif a certain ambidextrous fluidity.

Someone in Bush'es cabinet, and why not Dr. Rice, should have consulted a humanist after the shock of 9/11 and played The Horsemen for The Decider. The .02 percent of his literate hemisphere might have listened to Omar's role as the obstinate rider. You do not invade Afghanistan if you pay attention to the coda herein, whether Russian or American. Tight lipped. 

No obituary post the evening his death made the wire. He was already an acculturated mummy entombed, despite his last major role. Unlike Bacall, Sharif was finished as a bankable name after thrillers like Juggernaut came and went. It is the thickened beat in your arteries, the Arabic everyman who never got to be himself until he was far past the age where it might have mattered.

No third way for mortal coils?

"I owe the woman something, she kept me alive."-- Ed Harris

Disintegration. I have limited knowledge about abstract expressionism. One of my former Yahoo group members who understood what I was after, a disabled teacher from Britain, introduced me to the issue of de Kooning's work in conjunction with his end of life Alzheimer's, and then unsubscribed, in the story of my life. de Kooning lived a long time, and Pollock went in tyrannical fashion. I come on to piss and moan, nearly falling off the Jazzy getting off my deplorable bedding, transferred back to sunken lumpy mattress after rare accident, half-shit myself, got transfer right on the second round, logged on instead of cleaning what I can and going to get a little food, discover Anthony Riley has earned my envy, a rather selfish observation to offer, pondering these issues. I know why Ed Harris excels at portraiture, but remain diffident about Jackson Pollock's place among his contemporaries. Why couldn't he die alone? The film is a remarkable piece of biography, but the story is more or less sordid. What legacy does Namuth capture? Why did Lee Krasner sacrifice herself? What is it to break past Picasso? Why does the biography lead to cynicism even as the film itself is transcendent?

It leads me back to David Foster Wallace, my anger with him, because he had the skill to give me a place at the table, and doubtlessly would have understood me, and the bastard caved in, and I understand why, rejecting the medical model solace utilized by his wife, his father. What some established columnists felt about Phillip Seymour Hoffman's relapse and last trip on his dose over the rainbow, I felt about Wallace. I don't have to have known David to know we would have made sparks, engaging with each other, and yet I persist, obstinate blockhead, Harris' extraordinary abilities sneaking up on me. I should go, but let me let you know, I am giving my notice soon, told myself to give it a week or two, but I'll need a crash site, kabeesh?

Triage Eros

Tyrant is analogous to Alan Alda's reprisal of Hawkeye in ER, where the conflict revolved around a great physician coming to terms with what could not be concealed with a gentleman's agreement, and in the resolution of acceptance, Alda has a micro soliloquy with Laura Innes. Do I kill myself now? What if I wait too long and forget? Then the scene is taken from him by circumstances, concluded by offering a flawed man the saving grace of being needed. Some actors typecast into certain schema due to their personality are withered by it, but Alan Alda had an interesting post-MASH resurgence, having never quite been able to fill the lead role on screen, unlike Cary Grant. His arc in ER started it, his support role in The West Wing enlarged and maximized it-- and his documentary on PBS that imitated the Biggest Loser illustrates the flaw of his attempt to neutralize his celebrity by joining in the diet with the other participants. You cannot be a famous television actor and Everyman simultaneously.

I did go to therapy for what the center did to me, but every time between 01 and 08 wherein I made an effort to resume career I got knocked down again, and you need to filter through *the demonic supervisor* in that context. She knew better than to do what she did, and she knows she did me a grievous wrong. The center rationalizes it by patronizing those whom it ostracizes, violating federal and state labor laws on a regular basis. We need policy changes to this model.

Genius in the Water

If I wrote about every schlock thriller in circulation on the American market, I'd run out of room, but I saw  Deep Blue Sea  (1999) on the ever amazing flat screen and I have no idea why anyone would like it. The computer graphics showed a blatant lack of integration. Jackson and the supporting red shirts get carried off like plastic G.I. Joe toys, and the overzealous doctor, played a bit smugly by Saffron Burrows, broke the rules so as to cure Alzheimer's Disease!

I am not going to be too pc about this, but I wish screen writers could take more responsibility for their plot lines, and maybe read a little AS Byatt, who at least has the courage of her conviction about the broken characters she trusses up, with no apologies.

Alzheimer's can be integrated into our creative impulses, but using it as a tacky excuse for more fish monster elimination games is a bit of a crock.