things watched and listened to

I had a free movie ticket that I needed to use before it expired, so today I saw Side Effects, directed by Steven Soderbergh. It's the story of a psychiatrist and his patient, and the disastrous consequences that follow his attempts to medicate her depression. I've got very mixed feelings about this one. I liked the movie I thought it was going to be for the first hour a lot better than I liked the movie it ended up being. And there was some fail, about which I won't be more specific because it's spoilery. But it was well-acted and had that slightly chilly, detached Soderbergh feel which I like.

Also tonight I listened to an interesting BBC radio program, "Barbed Wire Ballads," which is about the sound recordings of prisoners of war that were made by German ethnologists, musicologists, etc. during the First World War. I had no idea such an archive existed, so I was very excited about this. Unfortunately the excerpts from the recordings are mostly ridiculously brief, with too much "contextualizing" and commentary that I didn't find very interesting or useful. Still, it's worth a listen if you're interested in the period, and it's available here on BBC iPlayer for the next six days. (Unlike the television iPlayer, there are no restrictions on the radio one, so you can listen regardless of where in the world you live.)