Postman

Editor's note: When it begins to look, feel and smell like snow, everyone prepares for a winter blizzard.Softly, gently in the secret night,Down from the North came the quiet white.Drifting, sifting, silent flight,Softly, gently, in the secret night.White snow, bright snow, smooth and deep.Light snow, night snow, quiet as sleep.Down, down, without a sound;Down, down, to the frozen ground.Covering roads and hiding fences,Sifting in cracks and filling up trenches.Millions of snowflakes, tiny and light,Softly, gently, in the secret night.

The postman rings thrice in "A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop" (opening Friday at the Charles). Director Zhang Yimou transfers the Coen brothers" "Blood Simple" — their merry-sadist variation on James M. Cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice" — from 1985 Texas to an equally arid but wildly multihued landscape in feudal China. Cain's book is a lowdown masterpiece. The movies are trash with flash. But oh, what flash! The film that established the Coens as our reigning cinematic smart-alecks, "Blood Simple" told a simple story of a woman, a gun and a saloon.

The Anne Arundel County Council last night approved a bill that would allow the county animal shelter to set up a program to spay or neuter all animals up for adoption.The council heard testimony but postponed action on a proposed measure that would make it easier for an animal to be declared vicious.That measure would amend the county code to broaden the category of a "vicious" animal to include any animal that has caused one serious injury -- such as breaking bones or mauling a person -- or three minor injuries or has been the subject of three complaints.

Even Michael Radford admits it's a change.The British director most noted for two exceedingly ill-tempered films -- "White Mischief," the story of a murder in drunken, debauched Kenya in the 1930s, and "1984," a savage version of the famous Orwell novel -- has now returned to the screen with a surprisingly gentle, sun- and love-filled film about a poet and a postman."

Independent filmmakers thought they went through a box-office revolution in 1994, when "Pulp Fiction" made $107.9 million domestically and "Four Weddings and a Funeral" collected $52.7 million.But this year, the indie spirit is flagging, at least moneywise. According to Variety, only two "specialized" films -- which it defines as never playing in more than 500 theaters at a time -- made more than $8 million between June 28, 1995, and July 7, 1996. The top 10:1. "The Postman": $20.8 million2.

SINCE THIS IS a full-service column dedicated to helping the reader at all times, I'm going to do you a huge favor today. I'm going to recommend two books to take to the beach this summer. And here's a guarantee: these will be the two best books you've ever read at the beach, period. These books are so good, you won't be able to put them down. You'll spend the whole day in your little beach chair reading, and when you finally finish, it'll be dusk and the only people around will be a couple of old guys in undershirts and Bermuda shorts with those stupid metal detectors.

"Caught" abounds in piscine imagery, but all this fishy business cannot hide its true identity as a strange cross-breeding of "On the Waterfront" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice."At the start of this resolutely gritty film by Robert M. Young, a scuzzy drifter named Nick flees from the cops and slips into a fish shop run by kindly, needy Betty and gruff, salt-of-the-earth Joe. They take Nick in, and he becomes trapped in a net cast by Betty, Joe's much younger, bombshell wife.Betty (the stunning Maria Conchita Alonso)

Turn mailboxes into works of art? More than 100 artists, architects and designers received plain mailboxes from the Archives of American Art, with a request that they turn them into works of art.The results, on view at 300 Galleria Officentre in Southfield, Mich., are to be auctioned on Nov. 19 to benefit the art archives, a bureau of the Smithsonian Institution that preserves documents and interviews that record the history of art in America.The exhibition has mailboxes by 118 artists. Ron Kent's entry, "Mailbox . . . and Mail!"

Jim Duffy's long City Paper article, "Kill the Messenger: The Last March of Bill Moore," is the winner of this year's $500 A. D. Emmart Memorial Award for published writing in the humanities.Mr. Moore, a 25-year-old Baltimore postman and civil rights activist, was shot dead in April 1963 while walking alone along an Alabama highway. He was carrying a sign that read, "Black or White, Eat at Joe's. End Segregation in America."Honorable mention and a $100 prize go to Linell N. Smith for her Sun Magazine article, "One Day at a Time: Living With Depression," and to Arthur J. Magida for his Jewish Times article about the Holocaust Museum in Washington, "Out of the Silence."

Ruth C. Mann, a former secretary and cafeteria worker, died Tuesday of complications from a stroke at Stella Maris Hospice in Timonium. The Sparks resident was 89. Ruth Catherine Moran, the daughter of a postman and homemaker, was born and raised in East Baltimore. After graduating from Seton High School in 1939, she attended a local secretarial school, then worked as a secretary. During the 1970s, she worked in the cafeteria of Stoneleigh Elementary School. She was married in 1943 to James L. Mann Sr., a buyer for the state of Maryland, who died in 2000.