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最近気になるのは男性の「彼氏いるの？」という質問です。あれは何なんでしょう？挨拶がわりですか？私は正直に答えているんですけど、結局何にもおこらないので、最近は「さあね〜」と答えてます。
（Ａ子、２６歳）
「彼氏いるの？」と聞くということは、Ａ子さんにはまったく興味がないということです。普通「素敵だなぁ」と思うと、かってに彼氏がいるだろうなと思うものです。何しろ「素敵だな」と思うのですから、当然です。だから探りをいれることはあっても、なかなか直接聞けるものではありません。
日本の中国料理店はなぜジャスミンティー?
Cinema Guide/REVIEW: Tale of unseen terror clutches like fingers of a dying assailant
By PAUL BAYLIS,Asahi Shimbun News Service
SESSION 9 Now playing * 100 minutes * Shinjuku Cinema Square Tokyu
Looking for a way to get out of the early summer rain? It might be worth dropping into a nice cool theater and parking yourself in front of ``Session 9'' for a couple of hours.
Despite its contrived premise and a few flaws, ``Session 9'' shoots a nice chill through your bones. The suspense builds well and the characters and their dilemmas are believable. And even when it falls apart at the end, it still clutches your attention, like the fingers of a dying assailant around your throat.
Directed and co-written by U.S. indie director Brad Anderson (``Next Stop Wonderland,'' 1998), ``Session 9'' ventures into ``Blair Witch'' territory of unseen terror. Its high-definition digital video gives it the appropriately gritty feel of workers doing a dirty job.
The cast is led by the volatile Peter Mullan, who won the 1998 Cannes Film Festival best-actor award for ``My Name Is Joe'' (1998). Mullan plays Gordon, the owner of a small building maintenance company who is desperate for money to support his wife and new baby.
Gordon has made a dangerously low-ball bid to rip the asbestos out of a dilapidated former mental hospital, promising to do in one week a job that should take three.
The hospital was closed down during the budget cuts of the '80s, but also because of allegations of creepy practices. The frontal lobotomy was perfected here. And, as Gordon, his second-in-command Phil (David Caruso) and their crew find out, traces of misery remain in the rotting facility: newspaper clippings stuck to walls and arcane apparatus stashed in rooms intended for God-knows-what unspeakable purposes.
Gordon and Phil hire some extra hands: Mike, a law-school dropout (script co-writer Stephen Gevedon); Hank, a slimy, would-be big-time gambler (Josh Lucas) who recently stole Phil's girlfriend; and Jeff, Gordon's adolescent nephew who is terrified of the dark (Brendan Sexton III).
The suspense begins to simmer as the tension between the men grows. Something is eating Gordon. Meanwhile, Mike discovers a set of tapes of psychotherapy sessions with a woman who had a multiple personality disorder, which he listens to between shifts.
A few niggling questions cloud the edges of this scenario. First, why the rush to tear asbestos out of an abandoned building that has no further use? Next, three of these guys obviously have some smarts, so why are they doing the dirty work, instead of driving around in vans, drumming up new contracts and keeping an eye on other guys with less on the ball who would normally be doing the work (a pattern I recognized in a job eerily similar to this one I did many summers ago).
The men complain of the ``stress'' of the work, but in reality, this kind of methodical, independent, physical work is quite relaxing (something else I learned that long-ago summer).
But despite these distractions, the first half of the movie is mostly edge. It only starts to dull in the second half, when the movie begins to suffer from its own personality disorder.
But it is the ending that does serious harm. At one point the movie actually ``cheats''-tricking the audience by telling part of the story through the delusion of one character, without any hint that it is a delusion. When revealed, this deception is akin to a character waking up and declaring, ``it was all a dream.''
Then the movie retells events from a different explanatory angle, instead of presenting them so the audience can put the square pegs in the round holes. And some pegs don't fit into any holes.
Still, these defects are worth mentioning precisely because the movie is worth a close look. (Remember the adage: ``It's when they stop talking about you that you need to worry.'')
And who knows? By the time you exit the theater, the rain may have stopped.(IHT/Asahi: June 28,2002)
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