Factotum

Last night I watched the film Factotum, directed by Bent Hamer and based on the semi-autobiographical book by Charles Bukowski. The title basically means "someone who performs many jobs". The film stars Matt Dillon as Henry Chinaski (Bukowski's regular alter-ego in his writings), who basically drifts from one dead-end job to another, but who prefers to spend his time drinking and gambling, and occasionally moving in with women who he picks up in bars. Chinaski's main love, however, is writing, which is the main thing that he works at, and his ambition is always for his work to one day be published. The film's very true to the spirit of Bukowski's writing, and uses many elements from other Bukowski works (the songs on the soundtrack were mainly written by Bukowski as well). It's worth watching, although there's really not much in the way of storyline.

Work was not very good, although I was feeling better today. There was no one thing that was bad, it was just a lot of silly little annoyances, like having to spend most of the afternoon trying to track down a piece of work to perform a minor correction to it, only to find no-one knew where it was, and the person who would have known had decided to go to the pub for his lunch and stayed there all afternoon. Eventually it was found without his help and the correction took less than five minutes to make. There are rumours that everyone is about to get moved around in the office, which no-one is particularly happy about.

I was glad when I got home today!