everyone has a different point of view, but the truth is real

 Dilbert/Scott adams said that in today's world, everyone views the news in their own  bubble: Interpreting what is going on in the world not as it is actually happening but as reinterpreted by our brain based on our own culture, biases, and preconceived opinions

 Traditionally, great books (and nowadays Great films) are the way that teaches us these lessons.

One of my favorite films is Rashomon: And this film analysis explains why

the four stories:

The robber sexually assaults the woman and in his mind he is so sexually wonderful that  she begs him to take her along with him. And that is why he had to kill her husband.

The husband sees the woman as immoral and has a need to justify her being evil so he can so rejects her...so he claims she kills him.

The wife? She also says she killed her husband when he rejected her.

But the one relating the court to the priest notes that the police say his wounds are that of a sword fight, not being killed with a woman's small dagger.

But the woodcutter saw it from the distance and has another story of what really happened

 Essentially both men reject her: The bandit because he just wanted to get his pleasure and had no need of her, and her husband, it was because he saw her are tarnished and so he neither wanted her nor would fight for her.

and then comes what makes this a feminist drama: The woman accuses both of them of hypocracy.

 the woman gets angry and tells them: You want a beautiful doll, not a woman, a full woman, a woman of passion: a woman that is worth fighting for. And goads them into the fight that kills her husband.

That is why her story and that of her husband is that she killed her husband (which the court rejects because the wounds are that of combat, not the wounds of a woman's small daggar).

and this is what I as a feminist take from the movie: not the question of what is truth, but the importance of those who are helpless. The woman was being thrown away by the men but fights back, and then because in Confucian society she is not allowed full personhood, she essentially accuses herself of murder out of guilt.

and the modern world uses the term the Rashomon effect to insist there is no truth. 

Ah, but the film shows there is truth, as revealed by the woodcutter's story. Each person interprets it differently through the eyes of their own needs, but the story is real and is true.

And the ending? 

The frame of the story is three people at the temple listening to the story of the crime. plus an abandoned baby.

The first man leaves afterward, stealing the money left with the abandoned baby, saying we need to put ourselves first....

and the priest is so demoralized at the story that he doesn't stop him.

but it is the third, a passing woodcutter who revealed the true story to them,  who takes pity on  the abandoned child and takes him home to raise.

and that small act of compassion not only saves the baby's life but gives hope to the priest and the demoralized audience.

happy mother's day

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putting the war on Irn into context

Iran has been destablizing the Middle East for 49 plus years via their proxies including Hamas in Gaza, Assad in Syria, the Houthis, and by taking over Levanon.

Bit the USA essentially helped the crazies take over by encouraging the dying Shah to leave. And as a result, the Mullahs declared war against the USA: 

And because Jimmy Carter was a Christian who hated war, he did nothing even though attacking an embassy is essentially a declaration of war...So nothing was done. Well, almost nothing.

In those days, Hollywood didn't hate America, so helped rescue some of the hostages, and later a film was made about this: Argo..

I couldn't find free movie on line but it is streaming on Netflix if you have it.

But there was another rescue, of American civilians, arranged by their boss: Ross Perot.

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How to put together a film: Not a documentary but a reframing of history

the remake by netflix was not a hit because it missed the point: The author was brought up by a relative who was strict and she was unwelcome by her father's second wife.

so it is rewriting her story, with hope.

this scene in Saving Mr Banks sort of explains how artists refashion their memories to redeem the past:

generational differences

Our family watches films, tv series, and/or K dramas in the evening.

 Last night I refused to watch the latest Knives out mystery because: One, I dislike Daniel Craig, and Two, from what I saw in the trailer, and various reviews, they got Catholicism wrong (i.e. they did not understand the culture of US Catholicism, and I read that those who made it disliked religion). 

So we watched a K drama instead.

As I get older, I am getting narrower: In the past I always kept up with the trends etc. even those I disagreed with, but now I figure my time is too limited to waste time with nonsense.

But my granddaughter said that in her generation, they don't see the anti Catholic stuff in the film probably because they are pumped full of woke propaganda about the rigid old church  which they reject. 

So they see this anti Catholic theme, which we older Catholics would recognize as being from the anti Catholic tropes we got hit with for the last 50 years, as if it were the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

. But what impresses the young kids is when they see the young priest going out of the way to help people. Sort of like the Pope Francis style of love love love.

and it is making them think twice about what is Christianity really about.

So the irony is that this film which seemed to be a way to bash Christianity might reach those who have had no contact with real Christians and show them what real Christians do..

here is a Catholic take on the film:

 So I stand corrected, so might have to watch it (yes we have Netflix in the Philippines).  

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the good news is that the last four episodes of Stranger things is being released today so we might watch that instead.

Tom Stoppard Thanks for the entertainment that made us think

I first saw this as a student when the pre Broadway try outs had cheap tickets for students:

Movie of the week

Filmed in 1985 so a bit out of date. But it is a bit of nostalgia for me since my medical school was around the corner from where this was filmed in Philadelphia.

Tibet news

the Delai Lama is denying that the Chinese government can appoint the next Dalai Lama, and he says that he will reincarnate and let an independent board find him.

 More background here at India Express which discusses the geopolitical background (including dam building plans to control the local water supply to India and SE Asia).

most people know about the story of Tibetan traditional culture and the Chinese takeover from the Brad Pitt movie.

legendary explorer? Heh. He was a Nazi.

But it is a good story. The original story can be read here on internet archives.

a documentary by the author is on youtube:

another version of the story was done by Martin Scorsese for Disney but made the Chinese so angry that it was not really publicized a lot so sort of has been forgotten:

the terror inflicted on that country and the cultural destruction by China is sort of known in the west.

however, China points out that they consider their attempt to change the culture is to bring them into the modern world.Their point of view can be found HERE.

Their point of view points out that a theocratic dictatorship government was replaced with a benevolent government that is trying to lift people out of poverty... by relocation, education, e commerce, getting rid of corrupt monestaries (gee didn't Henry VIII do this?) but also  relocating Chinese there (it is a hardship area for Chinese working there) and the Chinese policy encouraging intermarriage that has long term consequnces, as is China's polcies raising the status of women.

So what is the truth? Nostalgic views of primitive countries by those who didn't have to suffer from the poverty of those countries is the rule. And although China didn't have the right to take over Tibet and their takeover was brutal to those living in monasteries etc, don't be fooled that the place was a ShangriLa before the Chinese takeover.

we're gonna need a bigger boat

fifty years ago, Jaws hit the market. And became a movie legend

 

it was actually filmed before tourist season on Martha's Vinyard (if you look closely, you will notice the tree leaves are not quite out).

The people on the beach were wearing coats until they started to film, at which point they pretended it was warm outside.

NatGeo notes: Many locals had minor rolls. Indeed, the story put Martha's vineyard island on the map for tourists.

and it is almost a coincidence it was filmed  there 

[Production designer] Joe Alves chose the Vineyard only because the boats weren't running to Nantucket that day. So he said, 'Well, I’ll take it where it's going.' And he came over to the Vineyard.

by the way, the mechanical shark was named Bruce, and they couldn't get it to work correctly, so in most of the film, the danger is unseen, which actually made it more frightening (if the shark worked, it would have just been another shocker film, not a classic).

and although it was based on Peter Benchley's novel,  the idea came from a real shark attack:

when life gives you tangerines

Best K drama of the year.  

 Alas, the trailer, doesn't give you any idea of what the series is about: It is about family and how they support each other through thick and thin.  

I see a lot of similarities in our family. The family in the series sells their house to help their daughter get a college education, and we cut corners to get our granddaughter an education including college

 

here is a backstory for the story. 

 

They're back

so what movies should you stream?

 It is hot season here, and of course my airconditioner decided to become lazy, and with the holidays, it may be a day or two before it is fixed.

So I am up all night and sleep all day: If it gets too hot, I sleep in the other bedroom.

So since it is too hot to go outside, what am I watching?

Violence porn:

Reacher, the Beekeeper, A Working man. All good plots of saving the innocent from the bad guys, but the violence is over the top.

And then there is The White Lotus: annoying to me, since they are all rich narcissists like one sees in Hallmark Movies. So think of it as an X rated version of the Hallmark romances.

Luckily, there are a lot of old movies popping up on youtube.

that is an old Hallmark hall of Fame movie, in the days before they changed to romantic stuff.

and of course, there is always Agatha Christie. This is the older Miss Marple

Happy Days

internet archives has old movies and TV Shows: LINK to Happy Days season one.

more classic tv here.

most are individual shows but some have the entire season available to stream or download.

Enjoy!

Maria Callas the movie

 

a new film about the life of opera singer Maria Callas.

notice the brown muted cinematography? Why do modern film makers do this? I see this bad cinematography in a lot of modern Hollywood films, not just this one. Are they stressing her losing her voice and dying by their choice of colour balance? Who knows?

Angelina Joilie does the role fairly well: again a muted performance, and good enough acting that in a lot of scenes we don't notice the actress but the person she is portraying. But not in all scenes, alas.

the plot? Well, unless you know her life story, you will be confused.

But the music? Worth every minute of the film.

So I suggest you put it on when you are doing something else and enjoy the wonderful music. Callas was famous, not just for her voice, which in later years deteriorated according to experts (just read the Wikipedia page that analyzes this in detail), but for her acting ability: She could hold audiences spellbound by her ability to portray the role in the operas.

this biographical film shows clips of her singing and discusses her life:

 

and here is a BBC biography of her life and singing:

history lesson: The Awakening Land

 a miniseries about the early settlers in the Ohio Valley, starring Elizabeth Montgomery. 

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a reminder when they still told stories.

Based on Conrad Richter's The Awakening Land Trilogy. 

 Conrad Richter is best known for the novel the Light in the Forest which is a classic about culture clashes on the frontier, and how those captured and lived with the Indians often preferred their adopted family to the stricter life of the white family.

This is the Disneyfied version.

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some movies are propaganda (but good?)

 Before you had the PC film Conclave, which is beloved of the NWO types trying to change the church and has a twist of the trans bishop as Pope (for some reason they changed that Filipino trans bishop to a Mexican, maybe because they didn't want to start hinting that a popular bishop from the Philippines is a front runner to be the next pope)

well, before the church of believers was made the enemy there was this film. which is more about the history of the Catholic church in the USA than it is about dogma.

Pre Vatican II of course. 

Since it is Ash Wednesday, watch this as a penance and then ponder how things have changed.

Not all movies are propaganda

I haven't seen most of the film that were touted at the Oscars, and most of them I probably wouldn't pay to see anyway (although I might watch them streaming   if nothing else was on).

I prefer escapism and comedy and light themes.

Two recent films that are fluff but an enjoyable way to spend your time are Bridget Jones and Paddington Bear 3.

I was surprised I liked Bridget Jones, since I wasn't that fond of the earlier ones. But in this is is funny. True, not G rated, but it is a comedy about mourning and readjusting to life and balancing one's own needs and the needs of one's family.

as for Paddington Bear, well it's Paddington.

Not as good as the second Paddington movie, but a nice waste of time. The themes are about finding family. 

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Movie of the week

because sometimes you just want a nice movie that isn't about serial killers, CIA spies, or beautiful rich single girls  i.e. the typical Hallmark movies.

we have Netflix for new films, but right now we are also watching old stuff on youtube.

we have already gone through a lot of older films/tv shows there, although they have removed old series we loved such as Murder she wrote or Colombo, you tube still has the various BBC series of Miss Marple and Poirot. Newer series on youtube from Canada like Hudson and Rex or Murdoch mysteries are also on line.

Word of the week: Musketeer

 Canadian essayist David Warren has a sardonic essay observing the kerfuffle going on in the USA, and I noticed this sentence:

The reader who has made himself aware of only the USAID payments will understand what may, or rather will, be revealed as the Musketeers survey the remaining ninety-nine-one-hundredths of the U.S. government

Musketeers? Hmm: that is the second time I have read that term used.

it is a reference of course to the novels and later the many films about the Three Musketeers  . 

Wikipedia writes: It is in the swashbuckler genre, which has heroic, chivalrous swordsmen who fight for justice.

The original Musketeers of course were called that because they shot muskets, an early form of a rifle. Again, Wikipedia notes

...the Musketeers were open to the lower classes of French nobility or younger sons from noble families whose oldest sons served in the more prestigious Garde du Corps and Chevau-legers (Light Horse). The Musketeers, many of them still teenagers, soon gained a reputation for fighting spirit and unruly behaviour

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  trivia note: the novel was written by Alexander Dumas. His father  was born a black slave in what is now Haiti, and was later taken by his white father to France where he became a general in Napoleon's army, and he was partly the inspiration for the novel the Count of Monte Cristo.

cynical Oscar nomination for a man...guess they forgot this one

One of the reasons that a lot of people are cynical about the woke casting in Hollywood is that they are casting people who lacked talent, or were not as experienced and hadn't paid their dues in the acting business (e.g. the woke lady casted as Snow White...neither beautiful nor luminous on screen, making lots of folks quip they'd prefer the evil queen played by the luminious Gal Gadot) 

 That is why a lot of folk who think giving an Oscar nomination to a man who is a trans woman in a role in a film that no one ever saw is something big.

not answered: Is he a good actor, or is it a woke nomination that lets him steal an Oscar from more deserving actual women?

Just wondering. I haven't seen him in a movie.

  

But it isn't a breakthrough Oscar nomination: 

Linda Hunt won an Oscar for playing an Indonesian male photographer in the Year of Living Dangerously.

  LINK:

35 years ago, when Peter Weir embraced the spirit of the title The Year of Living Dangerously and hired an American woman to play a Chinese-Australian man in that political drama, his gamble paid off: Linda Hunt became the only person to win an Academy Award for playing a cisgender character of the opposite sex. It wasn’t an easy decision. The filmmaker had asked a fellow Australian David Atkins to take the role of dwarf Billy Kwan in the drama about expats in Indonesia during the 1965 coup attempt. But Atkins didn’t click with the movie’s star, Mel Gibson, during rehearsals. “Sets were being constructed in Manila, and the clock was ticking,” Weir recalled in a recent email. “The casting agent said he had a possible Billy Kwan called L Hunt. He then revealed he was a she. We were desperate and gave her a try, and she was great.”

Linda Hunt in ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’ in 1983 (Rex)

 an excerpt from the film:

of course, in today's world, casting a person of European ancestry as an Asian would be a no no.

Full movie here.

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the coup portrayed in the film was in response to an attempted communist take over, or maybe instigated by the CIA, or maybe just Indonesians killing the prosperous Chinese living there, or maybe the Muslims killing the pagan or Christian Chinese community under the name of killing communists.

Brittanica article has lots of details.

or read Wikipedia, who of course would never be biased (/sarcasm):

Deaths 500,000 : 3 –1,500,000+ 

Perpetrators Indonesian Army and various death squads, supported by the United States, the United Kingdom and other Western governments

Motive Anti-communism, Indonesian nationalism, revenge for the 30 September movement, Sinophobia, Islamic extremism

Lots of fog of war. 

Backstory: the Chinese diaspora are the Jews of SEAsia: They run the stores and much of the economy and didn't intermarry with locals or follow the same religion (being pagan or Christian in a Muslim majority country). So they were ethnically cleansed by Muslim Nationalists in the Indonesia coup, not just by the government but spontaneous pogroms. 

this ethnic hatred is because they run the economies and so locals can't get ahead.

This hatred of the ethnic Chinese merchant class was not just in Indonesia of course: many of the second wave boat people in VietNam were Chinese ethnics purged by the new communist government.

In the Philippines, a law makes it impossible for foreigners to own things, so in the past, many of the Chinese merchants married local ladies, and their descendants run the government. But there is still a lot of prejudice against the local Chinese community here.

Something to remember when you read about the Chinese merchants behind the expansion of Chinese influence all over the world.