Evanston: Sunshine. Storm
Evanston: Sunshine. Storm
The last movie I watched on the boat was ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. I had seen it before and liked it even better the second time.
The title is from a poem by Pope Alexander, as one of the movie’s characters mistakenly calls Alexander Pope. I just read online, “Eloisa to Abelard”, the poem in which the phrase appears.
Eloisa, or Heloise as she is more commonly known in English, and Abelard were real people who lived in the early Twelfth Century whose love story has become legendary. Curiously “the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind” does not describe Eloisa, but that of an ideal nun. Eloisa, who was forced to become a nun after her uncle castrated Abelard, had a most unquiet mind.
The movie stars Jim Carrey, whom I don’t much care for but who, playing a straight role in this, is excellent, and Kate Winslet, who is equally good.
It is a circular love story that begins at the end, and revolves around a business that can erase memories. Kate Winslet has Jim Carrey erased. He then decides to have her erased, but changes his mind during the process. Some of the special effects as this happens are both amusing and disturbing.
The movie suggests that if you want love, you have to accept love and pain and the whole damn thing. I concur.
An original movie. Exceptional. Worth watching a third time.
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The last book I read on the boat--I finished it at Auckland Airport between flights--was STORM OF STEEL, which claims to be “one of the great books of World War I, if not the greatest.” For once the claim is not exaggerated.
First published in 1920 and apparently admired ever since, I wonder how it is I never heard of it before. I don’t even recall how I came by a copy of a new award winning translation published in 2003.
The author, Ernst Junger, fought on the Western Front from 1915 to 1918, first as an enlisted man, later an officer. There is nothing of a broad perspective. No moralizing. Little about his life on leave--usually while convalescing from wounds. It narrowly focuses on the action immediately around Junger himself.
It is amazing that he survived, but then someone had to. Perhaps even more amazing is that he lived to be 103 and died only in 1998.
New Zealand troops were among those of many countries he confronted in the trenches. Reading the book in an airport surrounded by New Zealanders was surreal.
In the First World War the Germans were not the bad guys. That they were in the Second is the clear responsibility of British and French politicians at the end of the First who paved the way for Hitler.
I have long thought that in ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, a German wrote the greatest novel of the war. Now I think that another German may well have written the greatest non-fiction book of the war.
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After Carol took the birthday photo of me by the lake shore the other day, I turned the camera on her. Obviously she looks better. It is possible that she is more photogenic than I am, or perhaps I am just the better photographer. Also she is not 66.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007