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FEARLESS

5/1/2020

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Recently I watched Peter Weir’s 1993 movie “Fearless” again. I’ve always liked it hugely. I think now I like it more than ever.

For me it is thematically and stylistically closer to his earlier movies “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975) and “The Last Wave” (1977).

In the earlier movie, a group of teachers and young girls from a finishing school picnic at Hanging Rock on Valentine’s Day in 1900, and a young teacher and some the girls go missing. They are never found, and the movie becomes a meditation on unsolved mystery and its effects.

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HUNTER, KIMBALL, & KAMINSKY

2/18/2020

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Three names, with something in common. Hunter, Kimball, and Kaminsky. They are three scientists in cryogenic hibernation in “2001, A Space Odyssey,” their containers resembling nothing so much as coffins. They are among the four people executed, murdered, by HAL 9000. The other of course is the astronaut Poole. All that we know about them is that they are scientists, each having the appellation Dr. before their names, all of them are men, and they were brought aboard the spaceship Discovery already in hibernation because they are the survey team and their talents and knowledge will not be needed until months later when the ship reaches Jupiter space

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“A GHOST STORY” REVISITIED

10/20/2019

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When I first watched “A Ghost Story” just over 2 years ago I found myself more bemused than amused. My experience was somewhere between fascination and boredom. (Odd how the one can fall into the other so quickly, especially if there is a hypnotic effect.) But (and I know no other way to say this) it continued to haunt me. I took that as a good sign. I knew I’d be watching it again.

And I did, last evening.

The title might lead you to think this a horror movie. It’s anything but. However, if you find meditations about the vastness of the Universe, or perhaps better Time and Space, and the insignificance of human life measured against that, perhaps for you this will be a horror movie.

​

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FOLLOWING FINCHER: A LOVE STORY

10/13/2019

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I do love David Fincher. What follows is more a love letter to him than a detailed critical analysis. That being said, I would not love him so much had his work not satisfied some critical creature lurking in my brain. That detailed analysis I will leave to someone with more time and knowledge than I have, and certainly there is a lot in Fincher’s work deserving such attention. Some of that I 
​mention as I move along, and some of it is implied. He is an artist, and he creates works of art. For me, art first must entertain, interest, engage me. In that Fincher succeeds to a degree matched by only a few of his peers. As you will see, in some cases it took me more than one viewing to recognize the brilliance within a particular work. But loving his work as I do, that was an easy and always rewarding undertaking.

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USING TIME

9/13/2014

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As I begin this post, I am just about 1/5th of the way through David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas. It’s a good novel.  Well written. Well reviewed. I’ve read Mitchell before, an earlier novel that I liked more than not. Then I starting putting his novels in a large private category: works that I would like to have read but wasn’t sure I wanted to tackle. There’s an old science fictional concept from the middle of the last century that applies. Books could be reproduced in pill form, and when you took one you would have read the book. You could experience languages, scientific concepts, sexual experiences, anything, in this manner.

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I was drawn to tackle Mitchell’s novel after having experienced, several times actually, both in a movie theater and on Blu-ray at home, the Wachowskis’ and Tom Tykwer’s movie Cloud Atlas, which I found an easy pill to swallow indeed.

Will I pull back from the novel and stick the rest of it in that private category? Perhaps. Not sure yet. My probable path will be to continue on, a bit at a time, until I reach the end of its 509 pages. It impresses, but it simply is not as much fun as the movie. The carrot is that I will watch the movie again once I have finished the novel.


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euphoria!

9/30/2013

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With my childhood spent during WW2 and my adolescence during the Cold War of the 1950s, living with The Bomb when people took it seriously, I was programmed to expect that the end was, in fact, coming.


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