Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 22 December 2002

# 12:55 AM

Yesterday I had lunch at Restaurant Peony with a bunch of people from Wind River. This is a dim sum place, or at any rate that's what we had (they serve other stuff too) — really good food, but it's necessary to bring someone who speaks Chinese, because the staff are all fresh off the boat, as they used to say. (I suspect this is why the author of the linked review thought the service was spotty.)

Then that evening Shweta and Nathaniel and I rented some videos: Yes Minister episodes, and Labyrinth. Yes Minister is a thoroughly British sit-com about a member of Parliament who's newly Minister for Administrative Affairs and must confront for the first time the dreaded Civil Service; it's brilliant. Labyrinth is a Jim Henson fairy tale starring Jennifer Connelly as the teenage girl trying to find her baby (step?) brother, who has been taken away by the Goblin King to his palace at the center of a labyrinth. She's cardboard, unfortunately; the baby (Toby Froud) and the goblin king (David Bowie) steal the movie. It is not brilliant, but it's quite funny, and has a wonderful variety of muppets as the goblins. I liked it, even though I think a much better movie could have been made on the same theme. Perhaps with a more believable protagonist, or by having the baby and David Bowie literally steal the movie.