Sarah Polley, a canadian actress best known for The Sweet Hereafter and the remake of Dawn of the Dead, is twenty-eight. I mention her age because Polley makes a miraculous debut as director and screenwriter of Away From Her by telling the story of a fifty-year marriage attacked by an unseen enemy: memory loss. Fiona (the luminous, legendary Julie Christie) starts fading with small things, like putting a frying pan in the fridge. But when she forgets her way home, Fiona and her husband, Grant (the excellent Gordon Pinsent), decide on the Meadowlake nursing home. In adapting Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," Polley avoids any trace of TV-movie glibness or sentiment. As Fiona grows close to Aubrey (Michael Murphy), a wheelchair-bound patient who barely speaks, and Grant takes comfort with Aubrey's hard-edged wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis), Polley paints a devastating portrait of what gets lost in relationships even without the presence of Alzheimer's disease. All the acting is first-rate — Dukakis gives major dimensions to a supporting role. And Christie, a Sixties screen goddess in Darling and Doctor Zhivago, shows that her spirit and grace are eternal. She's a beauty. So is the movie.

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."