This weekend was a leisurely one for me, having limited my intake to a modest one movie per diem. Those were: Lunacy (demented, yes, and I liked the Benito Cereno conceit, but the animation was unimaginative and overall it felt excessively earnest—I could have done without the post-orgy lecture extolling the virtues of blasphemy); Into Great Silence, about which more below; The Puffy Chair (eminently watchable and quite funny, though more than anything else I kept thinking that it would’ve been perfect for the university film series I used to program) plus David Russo’s I Am (Not) Van Gogh, which was great. Especially the fish.

Into Great Silence, pictured above, is one of the longest movies in the festival (at 164 minutes, it’s bested only by the multi-part marathons The Century of the Self, The Line of Beauty, and A Lion in the House). There are a few missteps, but I really enjoyed it (capsule review here). Its illustration of the monkish life didn’t exactly make me want to quit my job and take vows of poverty and chastity, but it did make me want to clean my apartment. The next screening is Wednesday at 4 pm at the Harvard Exit.

Yet another reason I can’t quite credit claims that violent movies don’t affect behavior: I’ve become dangerously obsessed with crossword puzzles since watching Wordplay, a movie I didn’t even particularly like. (Note to self: mother-of-pearl=nacre, you idiot! I’m so pathetic, I can’t even finish a Monday.)

And one last new review: Sa-Kwa (which has been translated as “Sorry Apple”—a much better title, I think, even though it doesn’t make immediate sense). It screens next weekend at Pacific Place and Tuesday the 13th at the Harvard Exit.

Finally, if you read our SIFF Notes grid and tried to go to a very poor South African film called Cape of Good Hope at 2 pm today, I’m sorry. That seems to have been a mistaken holdover from last year’s grid.