We live smack dab in one of the most urban areas in the United States. But I live in Florida so I still get to see tons of wildlife.

Things I’ve seen just today, without even going outside:

1) Two great blue herons

2) About a dozen white ibises

3) A snowy egret

4) At least two great egrets, maybe more (hard to tell them apart)

5) A giant swallowtail butterfly

6) A wood stork

7) About a dozen frogs of unknown specie(s)

8) Two turtles

9) Cattle egrets

10) A dove

11) A hawk or merlin (these all look the same to me)

12) An anhinga

12) The fish it caught, briefly

13) One little blue heron

14) A male cardinal

15) A viceroy butterfly

That’s just looking out the window. I haven’t opened a door all day.

This is my mini-review of Cracks.

There are few films that feature characters that one both despises and feels pity and even empathy for. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another one.

This film will bring you a place that you will feel both, in creeping steps and in a confusing-enough way that you think almost that you’ve lived the final scene from both sides in all its desperate hopelessness.

Eva Green as Miss G in Cracks pulls off a quiet yet intense performance as a boarding school teacher who is not quite who she seems to be, perhaps even to herself. She exudes mystery yet is not truly mysterious at all – and at the same time seems nurturing and solicitous of her students and charges but is something else altogether.

María Valverde is Green’s perfect foil as Fiamma, an aristocratic, introverted and quietly adept Spanish student fleeing the Spanish civil war who is already even at her young age everything that Miss G wishes she could be, or at least could have been.

The film itself is difficult to place in the canon of cinema, especially as viewed by my American eyes whose sole real experience of British boarding school fare is Harry Potter.

That said, rarely does a film feature no male speaking parts at all. Also nearly as rarely is it directed by a woman (Jordan Scott, niece of director Tony Scott). And even more rarely are the women and girls allowed to be flawed in very human, very real ways while the director allows them just to be who they are – each cinerescent in character rather than expressing by directorial diktat some Manichean division between the truly good and the definitively evil.

Oh, there is evil in the film for sure, but I am not certain it is a chosen malevolence or more like some train on which the brakes are broken and the engineer is dead that will collide with the approaching engine and all its cars no matter what anyone does.

In that case, the work is like a Greek tragedy except the inevitable doom is visited on others as the worst fate one character can imagine has already occurred to her and within her.

It’s not clear if we are supposed to be seeing the events of the film through her eyes, or rather witnessing it as a documentarian: these things happened.

I rather favor the latter interpretation as though the film and the characters are well-drawn and not just sketches, they are there neither to be loved nor hated – they exist as cenotaphs to their existence only, and any other conclusions are left for the viewer.

This is something that makes me chuckle every time I think about it.

Back in the mid-90s, I’d use a friend’s account to go into AOL chat rooms and establish a little rapport, then say “Press ALT and F4 at the same time, and something cool will happen.”

Of course this is the command to close a window in Windows, so half the people in the chatroom would then disappear.

A few minutes later (everything about the internet took way longer in the mid-90s) they’d come back and indignantly say something like, “You said something cool would happen if I pressed ALT and F4 but it kicked me out of AOL!”

And then I’d respond, “Something cool did happen. All the idiots left the chat room as if by magic!”

Griefing AOLers shouldn’t really have been as fun as it was, though looking back it seems a little like taunting a 6-month-old for not being able to walk.