I Pledge Allegiance To 2009

My intention for 2009 is to be more active in my writing this year. I have been putting off the inevitable with the lame excuse that I'm still learning. I have much to learn and so why write crap? But I have learned that theory and knowledge can only get you so far. You must let go of the analytical side of you and just write. This is when the muse takes over and you write for the sake of writing. This is also when musicians play music for the love of music. When dancers dance just to dance. You can't critique yourself the very moment you are being creative for you will lose art for the sake of art. How eastern of me to say that.

Therefore I will list every movie I see this year and try to add some kind of thought. I may not be as philosophical as I would like to be, because sometimes just rambling can be of use.

Movie #1 - The Reader. Oscar season is my favorite time of the year. Maybe it has something to do with my desire to some day win an Oscar. Or it could be the level of excellence goes up a couple of notches. The Reader is the first Oscar contending movie of 2009 that I got to see and I was excited. The lovely Kate Winslet is by far my most favorite actress out there right now. Although I haven't seen everything she's done, I've probably seen a good three quarters of her work. And she never ceases to amaze me.

Movies about Nazis and the Holocaust tend to be a little didactic and at this point, overdone. If Kate Winslet hadn't been in this one, I might have avoided it, like I tend to avoid all war movies that critique current events like the plague. But throwing in an erotic love story between and young man and an older not-so-innocent woman provided enough of a distraction to keep me unaware that I soon will be bombarded with the horrific nature of the Holocaust. When it did come, I found an interesting diversion from the "let's blame the bad people" premise to more emphasis on the Germans themself; on how could the have let a such a thing happen. And then to appease themselves, they go on a witchhunt. Every crime needs someone to blame. In order for justice to be restored, someone has to pay a price. It's unfortunate that a guilty society fails to acknowledge their own blame. That they claim to have acted without proper knowledge and therefore, aren't as guilty as they would appear.

Well, anyway, not much is resolved, other than the display of the two people's lives who are affected slowly begin to deteriorate and then heal. The healing for the most part, is just a hollywood ending. Sometimes, no amount of compensation will ever put things right.

#2 - Valkyre. Much like the same joke about Titanic, I won't tell you how it ends because I wouldn't want to ruin it. It did provide me with enough suspense and interest to hope that the hero succeeds. It was an interesting device at the beginning to morph from German language to English to eliviate the fact that it's Germans speaking in english. My only quabble was it was perfect english, and I would much rather have perferred a german accent. But these are the things you give up when you enter the land of movie world.

#3 - Fanny And Alexander - An old nugget. I only decided to watch this because some podcast put it as one of it's top 5 christmas movies. I should have known from their number one selection of Die Hard, that the movie really doesn't have anything to do with Christmas. And despite the foreign language (srike one) and the three hour time length (strike two), it did manage to get on base with a single. Any body who has issues with parents, and how mean they can be, will like this movie. The charm of the movie revolves the elegant aristocratic lifestyle the family lives in. In The beginning, Alexander explores his grandmas large mansion at Christmas time, and in the process, we the audience get to see the richness and beauty of a bygone era. And noticeably abscent is the critique on how overly pious and superior such people can be. I get the sense that these are genuine people, however flawed they might be.

The level of magic and coincidence might be lost in the translation and proved to be a hinderance in judging what the movie was really about. But at that point, I just wanted the movie to end.
Would I ever watch it again? No. But it was a good foot note on Ingmar Bergman's career.