I had my first encounter with an Apple "Genius Bar" today, having been referred to the one on George St in Sydney by the always-helpful staff at CompNOW at UNSW. In brief, the power adaptor for my MacBook was getting dangerous, with the insulation on the wire between the box and the computer wearing through, and sometimes getting quite warm. Apparently these things are known fire hazards.
The genii require booking, and I think I got the final one of the week: 4:45pm on this, a Sunday, afternoon. The machine is still under an AppleCare warranty, so the bloke replaced it on the spot. The CompNOW people said it would take them three to four days to do the same thing, as they had no stock, and moreover would need to hang onto my adaptor for that time.
I saw this because Eric Bogosian is in it. (I remember seeing Igby Goes Down, which he's also in, more recently than Talk Radio, but must have forgotten to blog it.) It just might be possible that he has done or can do something truly great on film.
Ararat is a worthy movie, necessitating its creation and complicating any commentary on it. The cinematography is occasionally excellent, the acting fairly stodgy, and the present-day story a bit too fantastical and oblique to credit. Some of the historical scenes are brutal, others are deftly handled. The subject matter — the genocide of Armenians by Turks during World War I — required more historical perspective than I had to really get to grips with, and the movie didn't help on that front.
As always, IMDB has many perceptive user comments. There's an article in Foreign Policy on what's been happening there recently.
