I insinuated in "One last Tolstoy" that it would be the final post about Tolstoy. I apologize since that is not the case.
Last night I finally got up the courage to watch Anna Karenina, with my hopes as low as possible. I think that was a good choice, because I loved it. I will probably never watch it again (it's extremely depressing) but it was an excellent adaptation of the book. It captured Tolstoy's themes in an film almost entirely composed of dancing. It was made to look like a play, with some really bizarre scene changes, that helped the movie get in as much of the plot as possible.
It reminded me that nothing is ideal. Everyone has to live with their lots, or try to change like Anna, and get something worse than what they had originally.