(This was originally written a year and a half ago, the day before an exam for which I hadn't studied one bit, and I was feeling a bit... well, I wanted to feel cocky because it sure beat kicking myself for not cracking a single book. It was all bravado, though. Ultimately, the exam went fine and I ended up REALLY glad I hadn't wasted any time studying for it.)
I’ve been fortunate to find that I really enjoy my job, with the variety and flexibility it provides. But it’s not enough. Work is a part of my life, but it alone is not what will allow me to feel fulfilled and satisfied. I’m looking for something else too.
Part of it is relationships; part of it is new challenges and experiences. But a big chunk of it is understanding. I don’t understand what is going on around me, in an immediate, local or global sense, nor on superficial or deeper levels. I understand more than I did when I was 25, or 20, or 15 and that’s somewhat satisfying, but I’ve generated at least as much confusion as I’ve resolved. And I don’t know where to look, and I don’t know what the answer is. Come to think of it, I don’t even know what the question is. Do I need to know what the question is before I seek answers? I don’t think so. I think that the answer I’m seeking will be in the form of a Gestalt, and the question asked when looking at a Gestalt is the ultimate in open-ended questions – so open-ended that it’s more of a prompt.
Answers to the more straight-forward questions usually have at least two parts: first, the background and second, the specifics. Often, the background is left out on the assumption that the questioner knows the framework from which the answer comes. Usually it is the specifics that the questioner is looking for anyway. It’s hard to look for specific answers without specific questions, but maybe looking for background is a place to start.
I know that part of the background is in looking into history. Much of the way the world is today was shaped by what and who has gone before, and what I’ve learned so far has come in large part from here. But that’s only part of it, because how we think about and react to history is as important as what actually happened.
How do I find the answer? I suspect that psychology and philosophy will help me, and those’ll be the next places I look, but I’m not sure the answer is there either. In fact, I’m sure it’s not. I hope that by the time I’ve got what I can from these disciplines, I’ll have some idea of where to go next.
We’ll see.
Friday, April 07, 2006
Sunday, April 02, 2006
film fest!
This weekend was the North of Superior Film Association 13th annual Northwest Film Festival (http://www.nosfa.ca - sorry, Safari doesn't support Blogger's HTML link button... yet), featuring such well-known box-office smashes as The Lost Embrace, The White Countess and Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. None of which we saw, however. Here's what we did see, with a few thoughts.
Cache: A French film with English subtitles. Not good, not good at all. A man and his wife start receiving videotapes of their house, they freak out, the man gets paranoid that it's revenge for something he did to a childhood friend in Algeria, and then he goes home and climbs into bed. Slow and boring (except for one hideous moment), with excessively long clips of the thrilling footage of their house. Woweee, a car drove by. I had a nice nap during this one; it was the first film we saw and kind of killed some of my anticipation for the rest of the festival. Fortunately, we perservered.
3 Needles: A film about HIV on three continents... Africa, where three nuns arrive at a missionary and realize that the type of help they intended to provide is not what's most needed... China, where a woman sets up a blood donor clinic with disastrous consequences, and a man whose village is wiped out wants to find out how it could have happened... and Canada (Montreal, to be precise), where a man becomes a porn star to support his parents but has to deceive his employers to keep working, and his mother ends up exploiting the situation to provide them with the only financial security they've ever known. Very good, well acted with just enough time to think about the stories.
Paradise Now: A film in Arabic with subtitles about the last day in the lives of two Palestinian suicide bombers. It's a very interesting contrast between the two men, who are passionately committed to their mission, and a woman who does her best to talk them out of it. It's a thinker, and an eye-opener for those not familiar with the longstanding conflict in the Middle East... or familiar with only one perspective on it.
Neil Young: Heart of Gold: A concert film from 2005, featuring Neil Young with 30 or so of his closest friends on stage performing his latest album, Prairie Wind, as well as some classics (Old Man, Harvest Moon, etc). Fabulous. The songs are powerful stories about life and its stages, and the film is incredibly intimate, with mainly close-up shots of Neil's face. I hadn't realized that Neil Young was such a devout prairie boy -- maybe because he hardly ever plays here. This was my favourite movie of the festival.
Brothers: A Danish film with subtitles. Michael is a stand-up family man who is a professional soldier, while his brother Jannick is an alcoholic bum who has just been let out of prison. Michael is deployed to Afghanistan, where his helicopter is shot down and he is presumed dead. Back home, Jannick steps in to help Michael's wife Sarah with her two daughters. Jannick and Sarah become close but are not willing or able to betray Michael's memory. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Michael does what he needs to do to survive until he is rescued. When he returns to Denmark, he is unable to confide in anyone about the atrocities he was involved in and lashes out at his family. This was an amazing movie... no big surprises or anything like that, but deep and well-developed characters (even the kids!) with a heart-wrenching, gut-twisting story.
The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico: A Canadian "mockumentary" about a country singer. This is just about the funniest movie I've ever seen, and I'm not even going to try to describe it.
I thought they did a nice job selecting the films that they showed (with the exception of Cache, which I firmly believe was critically acclaimed because all the critics fell asleep and were too embarrassed to say that from what they saw, it sucked). We saw movies we'd never otherwise see, and they were far better than pretty much any of the old-tv-show-turned-into-a-movie shows I've seen at Famous Players recently. (Okay, to be fair, there have also been a remarkable number of comic-book-to-movie adaptations as well, which have also been pretty much universally bad.) These movies were well-written, well-developed, well-acted, and pretty much never heard of outside of the film festival circuit. Man, that Guy Terrifico... I'm still laughing.
Cache: A French film with English subtitles. Not good, not good at all. A man and his wife start receiving videotapes of their house, they freak out, the man gets paranoid that it's revenge for something he did to a childhood friend in Algeria, and then he goes home and climbs into bed. Slow and boring (except for one hideous moment), with excessively long clips of the thrilling footage of their house. Woweee, a car drove by. I had a nice nap during this one; it was the first film we saw and kind of killed some of my anticipation for the rest of the festival. Fortunately, we perservered.
3 Needles: A film about HIV on three continents... Africa, where three nuns arrive at a missionary and realize that the type of help they intended to provide is not what's most needed... China, where a woman sets up a blood donor clinic with disastrous consequences, and a man whose village is wiped out wants to find out how it could have happened... and Canada (Montreal, to be precise), where a man becomes a porn star to support his parents but has to deceive his employers to keep working, and his mother ends up exploiting the situation to provide them with the only financial security they've ever known. Very good, well acted with just enough time to think about the stories.
Paradise Now: A film in Arabic with subtitles about the last day in the lives of two Palestinian suicide bombers. It's a very interesting contrast between the two men, who are passionately committed to their mission, and a woman who does her best to talk them out of it. It's a thinker, and an eye-opener for those not familiar with the longstanding conflict in the Middle East... or familiar with only one perspective on it.
Neil Young: Heart of Gold: A concert film from 2005, featuring Neil Young with 30 or so of his closest friends on stage performing his latest album, Prairie Wind, as well as some classics (Old Man, Harvest Moon, etc). Fabulous. The songs are powerful stories about life and its stages, and the film is incredibly intimate, with mainly close-up shots of Neil's face. I hadn't realized that Neil Young was such a devout prairie boy -- maybe because he hardly ever plays here. This was my favourite movie of the festival.
Brothers: A Danish film with subtitles. Michael is a stand-up family man who is a professional soldier, while his brother Jannick is an alcoholic bum who has just been let out of prison. Michael is deployed to Afghanistan, where his helicopter is shot down and he is presumed dead. Back home, Jannick steps in to help Michael's wife Sarah with her two daughters. Jannick and Sarah become close but are not willing or able to betray Michael's memory. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Michael does what he needs to do to survive until he is rescued. When he returns to Denmark, he is unable to confide in anyone about the atrocities he was involved in and lashes out at his family. This was an amazing movie... no big surprises or anything like that, but deep and well-developed characters (even the kids!) with a heart-wrenching, gut-twisting story.
The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico: A Canadian "mockumentary" about a country singer. This is just about the funniest movie I've ever seen, and I'm not even going to try to describe it.
I thought they did a nice job selecting the films that they showed (with the exception of Cache, which I firmly believe was critically acclaimed because all the critics fell asleep and were too embarrassed to say that from what they saw, it sucked). We saw movies we'd never otherwise see, and they were far better than pretty much any of the old-tv-show-turned-into-a-movie shows I've seen at Famous Players recently. (Okay, to be fair, there have also been a remarkable number of comic-book-to-movie adaptations as well, which have also been pretty much universally bad.) These movies were well-written, well-developed, well-acted, and pretty much never heard of outside of the film festival circuit. Man, that Guy Terrifico... I'm still laughing.
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