Pun Salad

This movie is (as I type) number 119 on IMDB's top 250 movies of all time. It's very gripping, although it takes quite awhile to get going. Set in an isolated poor South American village, where (somehow) a group of foreigners have become entrapped without sufficient funds to get anywhere they want to be. Opportunity knocks when the evil American oil company about drilling 300 miles away hits a gas pocket, causing a well fire. And the only way to put it out is for our ragtag bunch to drive two trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over the treacherous route from the village to the drilling site.

The photography and staging of the trip is stunning. The acting is less so. Without giving too much away, the next-to-last shot of Yves Montand is kind of giggle-inducing, although that's certainly not the intent.

• Soxblog checks out Senator John Kerry's Boston Globe op-ed commemorating the 35th anniversary of his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Apparently the commemoration is pretty much occurring due to Kerry's own relentless self-promotion; he also gave a speech marking the event yesterday at Faneuil Hall. (The Boston Globe, of course, is eager to cooperate.)

  Soxblog deems the op-ed to be a "new low" for Kerry, mainly by digging Kerry's actual testimony out of the memory hole and comparing it to Kerry's current, um, convenient interpretation.

• Irony Department: Little Green Footballs covers the student art exhibit censored by Charles Garoian, director of the PSU School of Visual Arts (discussed here yesterday). It turns out one of Prof Garoian's publications is pugnaciously entitled "Fighting censorship in the art classroom".

• In the meantime, David Bernstein has much more at Volokh's. The Penn State spokesperson is disputing the facts as reported in the college newspaper; it's far from clear what's really going on.