Fatale Abstraction

Why is a unit of trouser or panties or shorts referred to in plural, as in "pair of" ???

I mean, it's not as though you could have just one half of one of those garments as one might with socks or shoes or earrings or mittens. How is that? One never sees half of the "pair" off sitting alone in the median of the interstate or stuffed between the sofa cushions - it is a single unit. How does that happen?

Cleaning this weekend, I watched/listened to several films I've had on dvr, some of them for months. Oddly, 4 of these films starred Samantha Morton. She's unsual, and an interesting actress. I think she's quite good, actually.

The first film was called Code 46 and featured a future world where everyone speaks some bastard language like Esperanto. Sortof a Spanish/Mandarin hybrid. Who knows? Anyway, most of the action takes place in Shanghai, and there are some spectacular shots of super-mod building interiors and some achingingly beautiful night shots of stunning architecture and neon-blazing streets that would make Vegas look dim. Great ambient sort of soundtrack too. Not an incredible movie, and actually a bit claustrophobic in ways, but if you like film, this one's worth seeing for the cinematography and soundtrack alone.

Another (English) film was an extremely odd thriller called Enduring Love which starred Samantha and delightful Welshman Rhys Ifans and Daniel Craig, lately of James Bond fame. They all witness a horrid accident and they go to try and help and one other guy is killed in the process, and Rhys (former singer of Super Furry Animals) becomes obsessed with too-cool-for-the-room Daniel Craig. It's a wild, weird story. Daniel Craig is a brilliant actor - I believe he has the potential to build a Kirk Douglas body of work with one major exception - I don't think Kirk ever whipped out the wedding tackle on film, and Daniel seems very proud of his. In fact, he seems to be in a race to best Ewan MacGregor and Harvey Keitel in the "here's waldo" competition. If someone is whipping it out all the time, I wonder if they are trying to distract from something else. "Hey, I'm such a good actor that I'm showing you my ding-dong. Aren't I intense?" No, you're horribly immodest or over-eager to air your shortcomings. Either way, it's a distraction. Seriously.

Tonight I watched a movie I wanted to see in cinema, Libertine starring Johnny Depp and (ta-da!) Samantha Morton. Yucky. Actually, what I really like about JD is it seems he'd rather play an utter gross-out than a pretty boy. Mission accomplished. His character just LOOKED like he had bad breath. Still, I'm glad I didn't go to the cinema for this one - extremely vulgar for vulgar's sake, it started to get dull. I felt like someone should have gone through the script and struck out the 6 or 7 sentences that didn't contain extreme obscenity, because they really broke the meter of the filth. But, I suppose, that was the point. At the beginning and before he got all shyphillitic, JD looked alright, even in that poncey Louis XIV-style wig. Whatever.