My friend S

Ever since I discovered that someone I know, a woman I used to work for eight years ago for just four months, had a resurgence of the cancer she had previously battled so succesfully, I have been reading her blog religiously. She is 41. She has a husband, a daughter and a son. The children are under the age of six. And despite a mastectomy, the cancer has returned to her body - her liver, her lungs and her brain.

She is a master blogger - posting every day, Monday through Friday - despite her illness, the various combinations of medication, oxygen tank sessions and chemotherapy, not to mention the journals, recordings and scrapbooks she is preparing for her children, so they will have communication from her after she is gone.

It is possibly one of the most difficult blogs to read due and there are more than a few posts that have brought me to easy tears. S is a humanist in the traditional sense. She believes in the power and the goodness of human beings, but despite being the daughter of Christian pastor, she most emphatically, does not believe in God. God, she says is nice to have, but He is a fairy tale that human beings have created because they are simply not strong enough to accept the truth that life is just that, and when it ends, it ends, and there is nothing more.

I read this blog every day, and even post comments occasionally. I do not make the mistake, as other blog readers have done, of trying to get her to see God. I know her too well. She will not let me get away with that. I worked with the woman as my editor for four straight months, and the work part of it nearly drove me to my wits end. She was and remains incessantly intense in the putting forth of her opinions, demanding explanations in the manner of a human bulldozer. But there would be moments outside of work, when we would talk of my K and C or when we would have lunch, when she would have unexpected softness that would surprise me and win me over, if only for that moment.

I also read her blog to make sure she is alive, to read her impressions and opinions which are less bulldozing on the internet page than if verbalised face to face. I pray for S every day, for her healing and for her peace and for the continually amazing courage of the members of her family. S is one of the most courageous people I know. The fact that she can be like this despite her disease all the while believing in nothing eles but herself is amazing. It is true that death will come to all of us. But S lives with its grim reality every day, like bread and butter at breakfast. More than anyone else, she lives with its certainty and manages with grace and courage to keep it at bay with every passing day.

Yesterday, I read that she will no longer blog five days a week but reduce it to three. She says she can no longer get to it these days...and she apologises to her scores of readers. "You have all the time in the world, but I do not."

Vicky Christina Barcelona and Osbourne Cox

Of late, the truly entertaining, well-written movie has become somewhat scarce for us. But in the last two weeks, the tide has turned in Singapore as both Woody Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona and the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading are playing at the same time.

As a Woody Allen fanatic, I will say that VCB ranks up there due to its novelty. After Matchpoint, we are now accustomed to a Woody Allen film without a Woody Allen character. But somehow VCB goes beyond that in its exploration of the various ways a woman searches for and responds to love and the idiosyncracies of the romantic relationship. Not since Hannah & Her Sisters has Allen delved so thoroughly into the feminine heart and the mysteries therein, and to such comic effect. Once again, casting director Juliet Taylor triumphed with Spanish actors Javier Bardem as Juan Antonio and Penelope Cruz as Maria Elena, characters that could have deteriorated on the page as mere cliches, but were so thoroughly developed by these artists into complex, flesh and blood beings who actually risk eclipsing the heroines completely. My only quibble, and it is a small one, is the use of the isolated narrator. Voice over is a tool Allen has used for decades, but it is frequently the voice-over of one of the characters of the movie. To my mind, this particular voice over tended to be disruptive and it would have been possible to let the film play out without some of the editorialising exposition, as well-written as it was - (..."and Christina...certain only of what she did not want". As a cheat, I would have made the narrative voice-over either Vicky as one of the more grounded characters or perhaps even the hostess ably portrayed by Patricia Clarkson.

Burn after Reading is not the triumph that Fargo was, in terms of writing, though of course, it has its own delightful ingenuity. But seeing the likes of Pitt and Clooney and McDormand and Malkovich play those pathetic characters was tremendously entertaining - even if the overall darkness of the plot in the end was a bit disturbing and didn't have the affectation of a moral centre that Fargo did. Yet the richness of the characters,their various mishaps and the mayhem that resulted all worked together so beautifully to express a most frightening message of random human stupidity and meaningless cruel chaos in a tragic world in which it is humorously and insistently clear, there is quite simply no justice.