Rope

We just watched Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. It's a superbly shot one-room drama with breaks in the shot only to change the film (which is to say, a real-time, single-shot film that seems like it's a play).

Two men strangle a boyhood friend, David, and then invite their old teacher, two friends, and David's father and aunt for dinner, which they proceed to eat off of the chest in which he's stashed. (That isn't a spoiler--it's from the first two minutes of the film.)

The film hits you over the head with the fact that it's a working out of Nietzsche--it's the superior dominating the inferior. This points to the gap between theory and practice and to the fact that the superiors aren't equally superior. Brandon is invigorated by his "superior" action, while Philip is torn up about it. (It turns out, from watching the documentary about the film afterward, that Brandon and Philip are gay, which didn't even remotely occur to me while watching the film--at least the screenwriter thinks they are; it's not clear to me what the guy who adapted the screenwriting thinks.)

How does Hitchcock fit himself into a one-room drama? At one point the camera looks out the window and Hitchcock is walking along on the street below.

Also: I made up a recipe for mulled wine that was basically cheap red wine, some citrus, nutmeg, cinnamon and pepper. I was pretty nervous, since I made up the recipe, since the store where I went to buy the correct spices and the cheesecloth to hold them all was closed, but it came out good and peppery. And the pepper wasn't bad.