It was Deepavali on Saturday, but to be honest our celebrations have been limited to admiring mandalas in shopping malls, and listening to the delightful music provided by a trio in the Gardens Mall.





The bright colours and cheerful song-and-dance routines of Trolls bore more than a passing resemblance to Bollywood, I thought.



But overall, the last week-and-a-bit has been primarily European and Latin American.

We took in three more of the European Film Festival's offerings, starting with The Sunfish, from Denmark. This deals with the plight of the small fisherman in a changing Europe. Reviews guess that the sunfish of the title is a reference to something "that seems to hail from a different era". Early on in the movie, Kesse is referred to as a "dinosaur", and his conservatism certainly singles him out as something of an anachronism. But the metaphor is complex. It sounds as though sunfish are not doing too badly, although vulnerable to nets and plastic bags. And at the end, after the storm of crime, humiliation, drunken despair, and dead-end job, we see Kesse adapting and heading out to the big wide world -- maybe back to his biologist, but who knows?

Our other aquatic movie was Tale of a Lake. There's no social message here. It's a long, loving look at the flora and fauna of one of Finland's enormous quantity of lakes as it passes through the seasons. Very, very beautiful. The underwater shots are so clear that you wonder if you've blinked, and the camera has surfaced while you weren't noticing. But no, here are the fish swimming past the lens.

You're reminded constantly of the creativity of nature. Very weird at times. I've never seen little fish emerging from their egg sacs. It's quite surreal. The stuff of a horror movie. And the big lobster-like things at the end, feeding on the dead fish, made you think of Star Wars.

But there were whole bundles of cute. Loved the beavers...

Totally makes you want to go to Finland.

Thirdly, and on a totally different note, we watched Who Am I -- No System Is Safe. As this review puts it, the movie "portrays a gloomy world of masked hackers, visually convening in tubes to spare the viewer the boredom of a chat box." The urban backdrop is not inspiring, it's true. The human world (known as "meatspace", apparently) is a world of nastiness and casual cruelty, of hedonism and betrayal.

But it's a clever movie. It keeps you guessing. And it makes you see the parallels between hacking and just common-or-garden manipulation. All systems have a weakness -- including social systems. Hacking and manipulating both involve spotting that weakness, and exploiting it. The distinction between the real and the virtual is further blurred by the red-herring suggestion of a multiple-personality disorder that the protagonist might have inherited from his mother. I wouldn't know if the technical side was convincing, but those who do know spot "very few absurd technological leaps".

It seems Warner Brothers want to do an English remake. I wonder if they'll wreck it...?

Talking about the blurred lines between depiction and reality, check out this story about Mexico City's Bond-inspired Day of the Dead parade...

We were mostly spared the commercial angles of the Eve of All Hallows, thank goodness. A few dancers were cranking out a Hallowe'en routine outside Johnny Rockets on Friday night. But it didn't disturb us in our lofty perch at Ola Bowls. (I've mentioned this place before. But I have to note their "Peanut Trouble" option. This has peanut butter, soya milk, and banana as the base, and comes topped with muesli, granola, strawberries, and pumpkin seeds. Excellent.)

Our Latin American experience came in the shape of an MPO concert. Different. The first half gave us jazz-inspired music, with saxophones, a bass guitar, and a drum kit. The second was more conventionally orchestral, though still rhythmic and inspiring. Linking the two was a Venezuelan harpist, Leonard Jacome, playing a Venezuelan harp. In the first half it was an electric harp, in the second half an accoustic version. Both are smaller than your classic harp, and have a quite distinctive sound.

He was sponsored by the Venezuelan embassy. I guess it's nice for them to have some good news. There's not much of it, apparently.

Noteworthy cafes this week have been Marco Modern Cafe at 1 Utama, which seems to occupy the site that was once Franco's, and still delivers some of the same kind of food. I had a very nice croque madame: a thick slice of fluffy bread, topped with ham, cheese, and an egg. We also scored a free pancake -- one of those nice fat ones.

Mid Valley was totally insane on this holiday Saturday. All the cafes seemed to be bulging. But we found a berth at Delectable in The Gardens. Cake was consumed.



In other news, after an absence of 2.5 months Guan Yin was briefly back in the shrine. Nigel wonders if this tree-niche is actually a hotel for travelling gods. I like that idea...

And there continue to be reflections...