Good night, Cubao!

Finished watching The Raven in the Foregate from the Brother Cadfael series. I remember that I enjoyed reading the book.

Father Adam is dead and a new priest, Father Ailnoth, arrives. He is deliciously dressed in black robes and a billowing, black cape a la Maleficent, wears a black, leather skull cap, and has a black walking stick topped with a black ball clutched in a giant bird's silver claws. He is obnoxious, offensive, abusive to the monks and the parishioners...and is murdered. Or so everyone thinks until Brother Cadfael's investigation is done. In the meantime a spy of the Empress Maud, rival of her cousin King Stephen for the crown of England, is about. The story is set, once again, against the politics and the treacheries of war. It is told swiftly despite the number of intimate scenes.

All of the scenes in this DVD are beautifully, delicately, and painstakingly lighted, and have the best close-ups of Brother Cadfael in the series so far.

Love that dolly shot through the flanks of monks that stops above the coffin with lit candles, though it was so exquisitely technical and distracting that I was jolted into the awareness that I was not in the medieval period. Also love that albeit brief scriptorium scene.

I love that billowing, black cape because I have one myself.