Woody Allen's Irrational Man

Thanks to Comcast OnDemand, I finally was able to see Woody Allen's Irrational Man. It had been at the top of my movies-to-see list for quite awhile, despite tepid reviews.

Something about the movie reads like a novel to me. It is intellectual and philosophical and not very Hollywood. It may have been characterized by my cable company as a comedy, but it isn't one.

I found the movie hugely satisfying. Any story set on a small private New England college will feel warm to me. Maybe that is because my favorite novel, which will always be in my heart, Donna Tartt's The Secret History, is set at a vaguely fictional small private New England college. Also, both novels center on a murder that felt justified, but destroys the killers.

Deep into his senior years, Woody Allen is making great movies. I loved the Curse of the Jade Scorpion, which was one of the final films he starred it. Removing himself from the cast allowed him to grow using other leads. So has setting his films outside New York. In Match Point, he owns London as he tells a thrilling tale of lust, murder, and luck. The French capital is all his in Midnight in Paris, where he brings the the 1920s French cultural scene to life.

I don't like every Woody Allen movie. He acknowledges that they don't all turn out well. But I think he is like those famous architects who reach their prime as old men.

The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon

I knew reading the beautifully titled novel, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, was a risk. After reading Tom Spanbauer's more recent novel, the self-absorbed virtual autobiography I Loved You More, had been a waste of my time.

The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon's narrator is a young Indian bisexual prostitute in Idaho in the early 20th Century determined to discover the meaning of his Indian name and connect with his roots, severed by his mother's early death. Shed, as he is nicknamed, narrates with a raw innocence, as if all the world is new. His narration is often lightly poetic. When he lacks the right words, his descriptions are pure and beautiful.

The novel presents sexuality openly and graphically, and in doing so, it explores gender, identity, and life itself the way only Shed's mix of ignorance and enlightenment can. Spanbauer is fearless and shies away from nothing, with his unembellished scenes of rape and incest. This is not unlike Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, which reads like a Dickens novel if Dickens had included included honest sexuality. Here we have an American Western novel with honest sexuality.

The cruel and righteous Mormons of Excellent, Idaho will make you laugh. The starving Indians clinging to the remnants of their culture will move you. The ending will turn Shed's world upside down.

It is odd to me that the pure fiction of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon feels more real to me than Spanbauer's more autobiographical I Loved You More. Spanbauer has a real gift to put himself in the shoes, the body, and the history of someone so unlike himself. The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon is a mind expanding work of art.

Your body wants you to regain weight

A fascinating article in the New York Times reveals what most people already know: that substantial weight loss is often followed by weight gain.

Fourteen contestants from the 2009 season of The Biggest Loser participated in a study of how they fared keeping their weight off long term. Five regained all the weight or more. The single contestant who kept the weight off (and actually went on to lose more) happens to have lost the least during the show. The season's winner, Danny Cahill, lost a whopping 239 pounds, but has since gained 100 back. Danny was a fitness and diet warrior, working out hours each day and eating a consistently careful diet.

The problem , researchers say, is that the body fights weight loss by slowing metabolism and altering the production of hormones related to one's sense of hunger and fullness. That makes great sense biologically. We and our animal ancestors evolved to avoid starving to death.

The implications of this are serious. Perhaps people who are overweight should focus first on maintaining one's weight--that is, avoiding gaining more weight. Then we may need to know more about what pace of weight loss is maintainable in the long term without substantially altering metabolism and hunger hormones.

It may be be that we who are overweight need to accept ourselves this way. If you are fat now, you will likely be fat a few years from now, even if you aggressively lose weight between then and now. Your body today is your body tomorrow.