Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Timbuktu

(France, 2014)

Here is a movie that got fantastic reviews, and I list it here only because we watched about a half hour of it. This is in no way the fault of anyone connected to it. It is probably very good. The first half hour was, anyway. But it is a sad fact that neither of us were in the mood to see the atrocities committed in Mali by a deranged sort of cousin of ISIS and the Taliban. I know it was awful, and I know I should look, but sometimes I just don’t have the stomach for it. To see a woman chastised for not wearing gloves these fanatics have made mandatory, even though she was a fishmonger and needed bare hands … well, the world has gone fucking insane, and the most insane of all are radical Muslim fundamentalists. (Runner-up: Trump supporters.)