What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Found this on a blog I have been following for a short while now:
In the rather good movie Berberian Sound Studio, an unpleasant film director defines it for us:
Gilderoy, let me just tell you what it is to be a professional. It’s very simple. You cooperate, you don’t question. You don’t argue. You don’t look at your watch. You just do the work you’re told to do and keep your personal opinion where it belongs. Am I clear?
In Saturn’s rings, the movie, is composed entirely of millions of still photographs using innovative visual techniques developed by the filmmaker. The photographs themselves were taken and beamed back by cameras on board the Cassini-Huygens Mission that landed on Saturn in 2004, a mission virtually unnoticed by the world. The film-maker is Stephen Van Vuuren, an award winning film-maker, whose love of image-making began at the age of 12 when his father gifted him a 35mm camera.
[Thanks Joe]
A short film celebrating the author by another master story teller.
What does spying do to the people who do it?
That’s the question writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck asks in “The Lives of Others.” And he asks it in the simplest possible way. Georg Dreyman is a successful playwright, and not just in the theater. He’s respected by his peers and tolerated by the government: “the only non-subversive writer we have.” He lives with an actress, a great beauty who has the misfortune to come to the attention of a government official. He knows he couldn’t seduce her on the strength of his own charm — but what if he got Georg Dreyman out of the way?
Problem: there’s no dirt on Dreyman.
But in the down-is-up world of dictatorships, that only proves he’s guilty of…. something. And so, in the way that officials use their power for personal gain, the Stasi assigns Capt. Gerd Wiesler to eavesdrop on Dreyman.
[via Headbutler]
This is a movie I will watch (& I don’t watch too many). The two boys in “The Other Son” have been raised to resent and hate each other, and now find out that they are each other. The “Jewish” boy is not Jewish, the rabbi explains to him, because his mother was not Jewish. The boy protests that he has been an observant Jew for every day of his life. Not good enough, the rabbi regrets. The boy has only to take a few more steps and he can convert. The boy is outraged–he, a lifelong Jew, must convert to Judaism?