Welcome again, Wise Latino Women! Black Friday’s around the corner, and yet I’m not feeling like pushing past a throng of people just to shop. I don’t really feel like spending a lot of money in a lot of things that won’t make me happy. I want to buy a few selected things that I’ll have the time to truly enjoy. So, I’ll be doing my shopping over the Internet, and inside my own closets and cupboards. Who knows what I’ll find there? If you’re a better shopper than I, please enjoy, and save the economy in the process. As for me, I think I’ll look in my trunk-full of “tried-and-trues” and allow my fingers to search for some complementing treasures (books, movies, music) to make my holidays even merrier. Happy Holidays to all of you, my Wise Latina Woman (and to the men who appreciate you.)

1. Movie “The Lives of Others”
2. Dwell Magazine
3. Anything by Nereida Garcia Ferraz (www.nereidagarciaferraz.com)
4. Laurent Korcia’s “Cinema” CD; especially cuts 1,3 and 4… and 12… and 15… and, you get the point.
(If you’re into broadway shows and/or telenovelas, you’ll appreciate his music’s sense of drama.)
5. The Antique & Collectables Market on Lincoln Road
6. Corinne Bailey Rae’s first CD
7. Macy Gray’s first CD
8. Music by Buena Fe, Habana Abierta, Yerba Buena and Orishas
9. Any Hector Lavoe CD
10. Anything written by E.L. Doctorow and F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. “The Science of Getting Rich” by Wallace Wattles
12. “Creating Money” by Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer
13. Netflix
14. “Little Stalker” by Jennifer Belle
15. “Post Coitum Animal Triste” (1997 French Movie, also known as Aftersex)
16. Women Artists: Sophie Calle, Helen Levitt, Marlene Dumas and Lorna Simpson
17. Christian Lacroix shoes; the more vintage, the better
18. Calvin Klein Underwear (and I was a fan well before Eva Mendes)
19. The SX-70 Polaroid Land Camera
20. “Tinta y Café” in Little Havana
21. “The Floating Opera” by John Barth
22. “The Long Hot Summer;” a 50s feel-good movie
23. Collaging… it really doesn’t matter how you do it
24. “Sex and the City;” the book, the series and the movie… and the thoughts behind it.
25. “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart, whose bath-water I’d drink
26. The soundtrack to “The Royal Tennenbaums”
27. NPR, especially “The Diane Rehm Show,” “All Things Considered,” and “The Splendid Table”
28. Tim Walker Pictures
29. Feng Shui
30. Jenny Craig (It works, as long as you avoid box-food fatigue.)
31. “Eternal Sunsine of the Spotless Mind,” the movie…
32. The Creative Writing MFA program at FIU
33. BusinessWeek magazine
34. “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath
35. Reading art books at the Wolfsonian’s Café

Have a great Thanksgiving! Besos, Anja
***And sorry about putting quotes around book titles, instead of underlining. Still trying to figure out this blogging thing.

Well, not me, but this guy does. Read what he has to say and make your own mind up.

Here’s a taste:

AS WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS once told Edith Wharton, “Americans only want tragedies with happy endings.” And not just Americans, it seems, but also Germans along with everyone else on this punch-drunk planet who is able to afford the price of a movie ticket.

Whenever I tell people that I once lived for sixth months in old East Berlin and even wrote a whole book on ideology and propaganda in that troubled society, they almost always tell me how much they adore Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film The Lives of Others. To them, this movie tells the true story of the East German experience and has redeemed their faith in humanity. “After seeing that movie,” they say, “I really get it!” Hmm, I always reply. How can that be? Because to my mind the young West German director’s debut epos is not just manipulative filmmaking but presents a profoundly flawed history lesson. Is my negative take on this Oscar winner – which made number one on The National Review’s “list of the 25 best conservative movies of the last 25 years” – merely a product of my imagined superior taste in movies or did the totalitarian experience sour me on “humanity” in general? Or is the scholar and history instructor in me rearing his head again? Since it is hard to explain my concerns to its devotees during a brief elevator ride, let alone amid the hubbub of a cocktail party, I think I owe an incredulous world a thorough explanation of why this movie is something other than “one of the cinema’s finest depictions of the softening of the human heart” (Conservapedia) and why thoughtful moviegoers should consider giving it a miss the next time it hits their local art house.

Before doing so I feel obliged to point out that my disdain for The Lives of Others does not in any way extend to fans of the film. On the contrary! Anyone who is willing to sit through two hours of gloomy Central European melodrama with colourless sets and pretentious subtitles has earned my respect. I also suspect that if I did not have such an intimate acquaintance with the realities of the East German regime, there is at least an outside chance that I might also think it was “the best movie I ever saw” (William F. Buckley). But I think nothing of the kind – and here’s why…

Keep reading here.

In Germany, “It’s forbidden by law to deny the crimes of the Nazis,” observes historian Hubertus Knabe, “But it’s almost forbidden by custom since reunification to really discuss the crimes of the regime that turned East Germany into a prison.”

The Lives of Others prompted open debate on the Stasi, a previously forbidden topic. Go here to read an interesting discussion about the film and the realities of the communist regime.

Every time I talk about top 10 lists,  I always start with the  disclaimer that I know  how pointless they are.

And then I ask myself:  OK, if they are  so pointless, why do I have so much fun reading them and doing  them and sharing them?

No good answer, In fact, making lists is far from the only pointless thing I do.

Today, I am adding some new films and slightly changing the order.   It is not a 10 best list.  It is a list of my ten favorites. A  list of 10 best films  would be beyond nervy given how many films have a legitimate claim to inclusion.

But it seems perfectly fair to make a list of ten favorites since they are, in fact,  only my favorites.

My favorites have stayed the same for over a year.  But for the last few months I have been mulling over “No Country for Old Men”  and “The Lives of Others.” (Now I can really hear you saying: This guy need a life! Who has time to mull anything over?)

Seriously, I want to make some changes to my list.  But according to ground rules that some friends of mine and I set up many years ago in a UCLA dorm room, I have to remove one film for each one I add.  I posted my last 10 favorite about a year ago. Here is my new one along with a list of contenders.

Comments welcome. Lists welcome. Ridicule welcome.

My Ten Favorite Films as of November 15, 2009

1. Dekalog

2. Godfather 1/Godfather 2

3.  Salesman

4. The Lives of Others

5. Amarcord

6.  Goodfellas

7  No Country for Old Men

8  Fargo

9. Rear Window

10 Night and Fog

__________________________________

Other Contenders (not in order)

Midnight Cowboy

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Au Revoir les Enfants

Shop on Main Street  (1965)

It’s a Wonderful Life

Jeux interdits

Come and See

Smile

Atlantic City

Three Kings

Das Boot

The General

Paris, Texas

Shoah

Invaders from Mars

Strangers on a Train

The Graduate

The French Connection

Double Indemnity

Les Enfants du Paradis

Les Diaboliques

Psycho

Le Salaire de la peur

Sunset Boulevard

The Exiles

The Last Laugh

Hotel Terminus

Happiness

The Third Man

M

The Marriage of Maria Braun

It’s not that I’m an idiot (although, in the spirit of full disclosure, I sometimes am), it’s that I’m sometimes clueless. Or, forgetful. Or, mentally misplaced. You see, there’s a lot of shit floating around in my cranium. Some numbers, some interesting data, some bullshit ephemera about what episode of what season in what obscure TV show a character walked down the wrong hallway to go to the bathroom, tons of music, a few memorized beautiful things I’ve seen in my days, some horrors I’ve always memorized, and a collection of all the breasts I’ve come across and been mesmerized. Yeah, there’s a pun there. A bad one, at that.

This morning, I woke up and smiled that kind of smile that only happens on a day off. I got up, stretched, did the various things I do when I wake up alone, the scratching of places and releasing of certain human fluids, then went to the internet and began absorbing facts. A typical day. There’s “significant amounts” of water on the mother fucking moon!

from here.

And I was reading some stuff about the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which I knew I was a few days late to, but it’s still fascinating, right?

I even put on some music as I did this. Made myself a little playlist in my music player and put it on random/shuffle, and you know what song came on several times? My favorite song by the Cure, that’s what. This one:

That’s “The 13th,” and I just adore it. Not the video so much, but the song, definitely.

There was a commercial on TV for a Friday The 13th marathon. And I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting.” Thought about 2012, the batshit crazy stupid but fun looking Roland Emmerich movie that came on today that I’ll probably see tomorrow with Conrad Noir, who tells me he’s not all that interested because he was let down by The Day After Tomorrow. Well, no shit you were let down by The Day After Tomorrow, right? Anyway, that’s most likely on tomorrow’s agenda.

Long story short, it took me until like noon or later to actually fucking realize that it was Friday the 13th. I probably shouldn’t be bragging about that.

It happened at some local coffee shop that I went to, and, well, it was embarassing, but interesting. I live in a small town, the kind where it’s hard to not get to know everyone and their quaint little stories. And all the Southern gothic ghost stories that goes along with it. So I do my best to avoid people as best I can, but today I felt like getting out of the domecile for a bit and going for a run and experimenting with various Pandora stations on my smart brilliant phone.

The search for the perfect Pandora station is man’s constant crawl towards enlightenment, nirvana, and the fingerbanging of God. The pleasure is in the quest, not the capturing because the goal is unreachable, but we still try. That’s the beauty of the humans, or something. Regardless, I’ve been bouncing back and forth, trying to find a good station while running/walking, and I took a chance on an 80s station.

Not bad, but you know what? As great as they can be, Duran Duran and Frankie Goes To Hollywood and “The Safety Dance” just felt a little too gay for this job. I needed something less festive, so I figured I’d shift a decade forward and did a search for an appropriate 90s station. Came up mostly zero, no joke, except for a fascinating station that played 80s music stars trying to make a comeback in the 90s:

Okay, that’s the lovely Bryan Adams song from the Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves soundtrack, which is fantastic all on it’s own (except when it’s used for a Dawson’s Creek fanvid, sorry), but in actuality, the first song that came on that station was Adams’ “Run To You,” which isn’t bad. And following that was some Tom Petty, which is always good in my book, and some Bon Jovi, which is atrocious (though old Bon Jobi works appropiately in some bar settings, I’m loathe to admit), and a whole fucking lot of Guns N’ Roses. It was weird, but I guess it did the trick, workout-wise.

Then I got to the coffee shop, got something to eat, something to drink, and meant to hide myself in the corner with some headphones and devour my meal and some more internet on my phone. Also with me were some printouts of various things I needed to revise and a copy of Warren Ellis’ new POD book, Shivering Sands, which had just come in the mail today. I feel like I’ve read most of it previously (it’s a collection of various writings of his from the internet of the past few years), but still, I was excited.

But as it sometimes can be when interesting people are in the vicinity, and frightfully true when there’s less than interesting people buzzing around you, I got sucked into some conversation. Found out it was 13th day of the month coinciding with the fact that it was also a Friday. Also absorbed some recent gossip. And, because of the recent anniversary, got involved with a conversation about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

You see, the conversation got even more interesting when it turned out that one of the women there was German, a former resident of East Berlin, who had been 18 when the wall came down, and moved to America shortly after. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with Germans in the past (and no, I’m not referring to World War II, though that was no picnic either, ha ha!), but every once in a while, I have a good experience with their women.

The woman and I talked for some time about the Berlin Wall, and primarily what it was like for her growing up in East Berlin. Essentially, it was bleak, but fascinating. And we had one of those conversations that always pop where she mentions that she was feeling uneasy today because she had left her cell phone at home and she just feels like she’s naked and out of touch, but growing up poor in Germany, they didn’t even have a phone in their house til she was 16. “How did we live in that ancient, strange world?” she asked with a laugh.

She had just seen The Lives Of Others a few weeks ago, she told me, and we talked about the movie, which is really quite good if you haven’t seen it yet, and about the Stasi in general. She told me that the movie scares her because back then, when she was growing up, you just always knew you were being watched, being monitored. You always suspected who was a Stasi man, but you never really knew for sure. And it didn’t hit you until later that it wasn’t so much agents of the Stasi you had to worry about, but those around you because everyone was informing on each other to get ahead.

Could’ve been worse. He could’ve thrown up in her lap.

From there we went into little aspects of German history, talking about “The Iron Chancellor” and how the Prussians united the country a hundred years before the Wall fell, and we even talked a little about Merkel, or “Angie,” as she called her, and told me what a fan she is, being that they’re both East German girls. She told me how it was so weird for her to come to America in her twenties and get a more full view of her own little world up til then and to compare it to growing up in communist Germany, where history was repainted with a propaganda slant. She mentioned that as a teen they were never allowed to refer to the Wall as just “the Wall,” it was always as the “tool for anti-fascist defense” or something like that.

She told me how when she was in school, it was a mandatory field trip for the kids to be taken to the concentration camps and shown all the gross details, the rooms with human remains permanently staining the walls, with the empty shoes of little babies that were turned to dust, the lampshades made out of flayed skin featuring Jewish tattoos. She told me how the physical evidence of the darkest corners of history would never leave her mind and part of her was glad that she was forced to see that shameful part of her country’s past, but that it’s something she knows kids don’t go to see anymore.

I don’t want to use the word “fascinating” again in this post, but that’s what it was. A fascinating conversation, and a fantastic one, informative and insightful. I thanked her for her time and being so patient with my curiousity, and of course for letting me know that it was actually Friday the 13th. Then I left, since I had been there for quite some time and it was starting to look like it might rain. I wasn’t interesting in listening to sad old men with hair plugs crooning bar anthems into my ear, so I just walked in silence, my head heavy with thoughts about everything we discussed.

“Komm rüber!” Hans Conrad Schumann defects, from here.

It did start raining before I got back to my front door, of course, but my mind was elsewhere and I didn’t actually realize it until I was pulling my key out to let myself back in and realized I was shivering there as the water dripped off of me.

And how did you spend your Friday the 13th?

The Lives of Others won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film

When The Lives of Others came out a little over two years ago, I was on top of it. I was in London at the time, where the film was being released ahead of release in the United States. What great happenstance – a movie that was just up my alley, in German, that I would get to see exclusively before my peers! But I couldn’t find anyone to go with me, and stupidly put it on the backburner, when I should have just marched down to the cinema and seen by myself. When I got back to the U.S., I downloaded a German DVD quality version, since I didn’t need the subtitles (and it wasn’t out with English subs yet), and fully intended to watch it. And then I didn’t.

You see, I have to be in a certain mood for German films, specifically to go into “German mode,” and switch my brain over to the part that can hone in on the idiomatic phrasing, the particular German cadence (not harsh at all, if you’re used to it) and settle in for, generally, a depressing time. Germans seem to only make two kinds of films – depressing, historical epics about the darkest times in modern history, and ridiculous comic farces that attempt to court the German audience away from dubbed Hollywood fare. Only the former ever gets exported.

And, specifically, The Lives of Others covers a topic to which I am particularly personally tied: life in East Germany, and the emotional wreckage left behind by the Stasi. It follows a Stasi agent, Wiesler, formerly a brass-tacks interrogator and now a teacher, who takes on an assignment that intrigues him – wiretapping playwright Georg Dreyman and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland, to make sure he is not pro-Western (and if he is, to ban his works, or worse). As he listens in on their life, he comes to care deeply for them, and then protect them from a system that wishes to do them harm. I knew I’d love it. But I also knew it would be an intense two hours of my life.

Then The Lives of Others was nominated for and then won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars, but it had been pushed so far onto my back burner, that it got lost, and forgotten. I was no longer on a film kick, I was a TV girl, so it languished on my hard drive for the last two years. Until this weekend. The 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall pushed me headlong right into a perfect German mood, and suddenly I desperately wanted to watch a moody, Teutonic film. So I finally watched The Lives of Others. And it was precisely what I was had expected: an artful film, with complex, deep emotions, and a poetic, cathartic ending.

It was a bit of a slow-starter, though. I tried subtitles first, worried I was just too rusty for such serious fare, but found them really horribly done, and distracting (I don’t think they’re the hard-coded ones that come with the DVD; they felt like a crappy job done by someone not well versed in German to English translation). Once I’d turned them off, it was easier to become engrossed in the story. But, that said, the story isn’t particularly action-driven. There’s a lot of exposition and character development, and in grand European tradition (and unlike Hollywood), they don’t spell things out for you. While it eventually becomes apparent that Wiesler is seeing the error in his ways, so to speak, there’s no aha moment. If you don’t like slow-cooker dramas, it’s not for you. I can definitely see some people finding it boring. Plus, if you don’t have any knowledge of East Germany, its history and the Stasi, while the emotional hook of the story should be enough, you may lose some of the subtlety — I was definitely filling in a lot of the gaps with my own knowledge.

The parts add up to an emotional whole, though, and the acting is top-notch. Ulrich Muehe does an incredible job as Wiesler, considering his character spends the majority of the action listening to others’ conversations, and has many scenes where he doesn’t speak at all.  Sebastian Koch and Martina Gedeck lend Dreyman and Sieland fantastic layers, making it easy to see how Wiesler would be won over by them, as well. It has a moving ending, as well, though it is again very non-Hollywood, and almost anti-climatic. But it is oh-so-satisfying. The last ten minutes were by far my favorite, in fact, as they speak to the East Germany that I knew, and the one the particularly fascinates me: the one that came after it all came tumbling down. I won’t spoil it exactly, but how Dreyman reacts upon reading his Stasi file was not what I expected. It’s refreshing to not be able to predict the ending of such a film.

So I feel silly for not having watched The Lives of Others before, but am glad I was in the right mental space for it. Had I not been, I don’t know if the slow start would have kept my attention. If you like history, and character-driven dramas, I recommend it. It’s the most high-profile German film depicting life in the East, and it’s nice to see a dense German film that isn’t about World War II. Plus, there’s something to be said for finding a dim ray of light, even a fictional one, in the darkness of such a murky ethical period.

Two recent works stand out for me. If you haven’t seen it yet, get your hands on a copy of Von Donnersmarck’s film The Lives of Others. It’s about a ruthless Stasi officer who must put a dissident playwright under total surveillance. What follows is one of the most compelling and moving character transformations I’ve ever seen.

The other is Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘N’ Roll. It’s not as good as Arcadia–Stoppard’s masterpiece–but like The Lives of Others, it’s so thematically rich and philosophically insightful, I insist you see it.  Max, a professor of Marxism at Cambridge, visits his former student, Jan, in Prague. It’s 1971 and Husak has tightened the screws. Max is having a bit of trouble dealing with a bout of cognitive dissonance. His theory doesn’t match communist practice. And then:

Max: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ What could be more simple, more rational, more beautiful? It was the right idea in the wrong conditions for fifty years and counting. A blip. Christ, we waited long enough for someone to have it.

Jan: A blip. Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler. Perhaps we aren’t good enough for this beautiful idea. This is the best we can do with it. Marx knew we couldn’t be trusted. First the dictatorship, till we learned to be good, then the utopia where a man can be a baker in the morning, a lawmaker in the afternoon and a poet in the evening. But we never learned to be good, so look at us. A one-legged man showed up at my school once. He waited outside the classroom. It turned out that the man with one leg had come to say good-bye to our teacher. Afterwards, the teacher explained to us his friend lost his leg in the war, so as a special favor he’d been given permission to go and live near his sister somewhere in north Bohemia. ‘You see,’ our teacher said, ‘how Communism looks after its war heroes.’ So I put my hand up. God, I must have been stupid. I really thought it would be interesting for them, so I said in England anyone could live anywhere they liked, even if they had two legs. My mother was questioned and she lost her job at the shoe factory, but the point is the other kids in the class. They thought I was telling travellers’s tales. They couldn’t grasp the idea of a country where someone, anyone, could decide to move to another town and just go there. Suppose everybody wanted to live in Bohemia when their job is in Moravia! How would such a society work?

I also found Tom Rob Smith’s two novels to be quite good. Child 44 is a cracking good read. And Ian McEwan’s The Innocent is a tight, dark thriller about a botched effort to dig a tunnel under the Soviet controlled section of Berlin. Any other suggestions?

The Berlin Wall fell twenty years ago today. CEI released a video to mark the occasion.

See also Fred Smith’s writeup, re-posted here in its entirety:

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came crashing down. Today marks the twentieth anniversary of that great day – one of the greatest in the history of human freedom. Communism in Germany finally collapsed, setting off a domino effect that would reach Moscow within two years. Families torn apart for nearly three decades came together in tearful, happy reunions as the world watched. The Cold War was finally, mercifully, ending.

Many historians cite World War I as the twentieth century’s opening act. Sixteen million souls died in that war over nothing. Two of the nations it toppled became the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Communist and fascist governments would combine to kill more than one hundred million people over the next seven decades. Those needless deaths are the twentieth century’s legacy, every bit as much as the transistor or rock ‘n roll.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was that short, bloody century’s coda.

November 9, 1989 was also the start of something better. It was a nation’s way of saying that it was ready to move on to better times. To a new world defined not by oppression, ideology, and servitude, but by freedom. Sweet, precious, fragile freedom. Seeing the footage on the news was like witnessing something being born. The hope and potential that surround every birth were glimmering in people’s eyes. It was beautiful.

What Berlin’s people did on that day also inspired half a continent to send the same message to their leaders. What a noble achievement. How worthy of commemoration, now that twenty years have passed.

What a shame, then, that this milestone has been treated more like a millstone by the media. Reporters more concerned with today’s news cycle are giving at best perfunctory attention to a day that showed us all that is good about humanity.

To partially right that wrong, CEI has produced a short video commemorating what the Berlin Wall’s fall symbolizes. I hope you will watch it and enjoy it. Of course, it is hard to convey in a few short minutes what the people living in that Wall’s shadow went through for 29 long years.

So put yourself in their shoes. Think what they thought. Look right in the eyes of those separated families as they try to catch glimpses of each other over that wall. And the people who risked their lives escaping. And the soldier carrying back the body of someone who didn’t make it. What was going through his mind as he carried out his grisly task? That might give you an idea of what the Berlin Wall meant.

We all need to remember the Berlin Wall. We need to say to each other, “Never again.” And we have to mean it.

Happy 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall! Here’s a report in German about the celebrations, including gigantic decorated dominoes lined up in Berlin to commemorate the fall of the wall.
Video of Berlin Wall celebrations
You can read an article in English about the domino wall.

I was in eighth grade at the time the wall fell, and remember watching Tom Brokaw with the news on TV. My mother was astounded at the news and couldn’t believe it. Even though I didn’t quite understand the ramifications then, I knew it was an historical event of huge import. Once I was in high school, and learned more about the Cold War, Communism and the Eastern Bloc, only then did I start to understand the significance.

Here are some stories related to the fall of the wall that I like to share with my students.

In 1993, my dear friend Janet was in Germany as an exchange student for a few weeks. During her visit, she traveled to Berlin and was able to hack off a piece of the wall. She gave it to me, and I’ve treasured this unassuming bit of grey concrete ever since. Not only do I value my bit of the wall for its historical significance, but it’s also made for a great classroom aid. The piece I have is about the size of an apple. Doing a quick search online, I could probably sell it for about $200 if I really wanted. (Not for sale!)

In June 1995, just a few years after the wall fell, I traveled to Berlin with some of my host siblings. One of my host sisters was studying medicine in Berlin. To save money, my host sister rented an apartment in East Berlin.

The apartment had originally been owned by an elderly couple. They had lived at least since the war, and possibly earlier than that. The wife had passed on in the early nineties, after her husband had died. Essentially the apartment was in its original state. It was on a Soviet-style, drab-looking street, with very little greenery. The buildings were built of red brick, and the streets and sidewalks were paved with greystone.

The apartment only had a Kachelofen or masonry heater for heat. It’s a cost effective way to provide heat, especially in a smaller space like that. My host sister didn’t have to pay rent for the first few months she lived in the apartment, provided she did renovations. She removed a chandelier from the 1950’s. Only later did she discover the exact same chandelier in one of the museums in Berlin, realizing it was a fine piece of artwork from the time period. While we were visiting, we helped my host sister pull up the front hall vinyl flooring. Underneath the flooring, we found several aluminum coins from the DDR period, and also two 20 Mark notes.

I only have some of the above coins, not a full set. Perhaps I should look into getting a full set of coins, for my own personal interest, historical interest, and for my future German classes.

I have two of the 20 Mark notes.

Here’s a picture of all the DDR Bank notes, excluding the 500 Mark note:

DDR, by the way, is the German term for East Germany. It stands for: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or the GDR – German Democratic Republic. I am so used to referring to East Germany as the “ehmalige DDR”, I sometimes forget that a non-German speaker wouldn’t know what I mean by DDR. Ehmalig means former.

Anyway, when we discovered this old DDR money underneath the vinyl flooring, I was bewitched by it. My imagination invented wild stories as to why this couple had stashed about 45 Marks under their hallway flooring. Perhaps it was just an extra stash of money, or maybe, just maybe, they were saving up to flee the DDR! You can imagine the stories that swirled in my mind. My host sister was totally uninterested in the money, as were my other host siblings. They gladly gave it to me, partially amused by my interest in something they saw as worthless. I still have the bank notes and coins, and loved showing them off to my students. The reverse side of the 20-Mark note has a picture of school children gleefully heading to school, in order to learn about being a good citizen of the DDR.

On the same trip to Berlin, we spent a day in Potsdam. I would like to go back and see how it has changed since the reunification of Germany. At the time, a lot of construction and renovation was happening in Potsdam, to help it regain its former status as an important historical city. I was struck by the stark difference between the beautiful historic homes and the castle Schloß Sanssouci, and the Soviet-era buildings that often incorporated propagandist artwork, elevating the status of the humble worker.

When I started teaching German, most of my students were born after the fall of the wall. It’s always interesting to see their reactions. Some of the them are true history nuts and know a lot already about the Berlin wall. But most of my students never gave much thought to what life would have been like living in a divided city, or in a communist country during the Cold War. In my classroom, we could see a major road from the windows. I had my students imagine that the local government decided to erect a huge wall in the middle of that road. This worked pretty well as a tool to help students start thinking about what a divided city would be like. I then told my students that if they had friends or family on the opposite side of the wall, they would never be allowed to visit them, unless they got special permission. And, of course, they had to imagine that there was a no-man’s land, heavily guarded by the military. Once my students started thinking more and more about the difficulties such a wall posed, they began to understand what faced the citizens in Berlin and in the DDR.

There have been some excellent movies in recent years highlighting this time period. The movie Good Bye, Lenin! (or click here for the IMDB synopsis) is about a woman who is in a coma during the fall of the wall. When she reawakens, eight months later, her son attempts to hide the fact that her beloved-DDR is no more.

Another movie I’ve shown to my students is called Sonnenallee, which I don’t believe is available in English, unfortunately. It’s based on a book about Sonnenallee street, which was divided in two because of the wall. This movie takes place during the seventies, when Rock ‘N Roll was more or less forbidden in the DDR. It’s a humorous view of a teenager, his friends and his family and how they live behind the wall.

And finally, the fabulous movie The Lives of Others details what happens to a DDR Stasi officer when he becomes more and more interested in the lives of two stars he is spying on.

I am sure there are other films about this time period I am not thinking of; feel free to add your suggestions in the comments. Even though films are fiction, ultimately, I think the stories and situations helped my students understand the serious nature of the Cold War time period, and the role the DDR played in the politics of the time.

Twenty years ago today, one of the most enduring symbols of the Cold War – the Berlin Wall – began to fall, taking with it divisions that had cleaved both the city and the world for decades.

The fall of the wall was also the biggest domino in a tumbling of regimes and barriers right across Europe and into the Soviet Union.

Read Berlin War: 20 years on and Germany:Tug of Wall

I have added a link to an article from Culturewatch on The Lives of Others that you may wish to read. Culturewatch  describes their work as exploring the message behind the media and it has a Christian focus.  Here is an extract:

The Lives of Others is one of the finest new films I’ve seen in a long time. Winner of the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, it is all the more amazing as this is German writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmark’s first film. Set in East Berlin in 1984, it is the story of two men. The first is Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a playwright who is thought by the authorities to be alone among his peers in his loyalty to the Socialist Unity Party. The second, State Security (Stasi) Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), is absolutely committed to the Party and highly effective in his work. He has his doubts about Dreyman’s loyalty when he watches him at the premiere of his new play. Wiesler’s former classmate, Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), has become head of the Stasi culture department and laughs off Wiesler’s suspicions. But Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme) has his eye on Dreyman’s girlfriend and leading lady Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). It would be useful for him if Dreyman was found to be disloyal, so he suggests to Grubitz that Dreyman should be placed under surveillance. Grubitz, eager to curry favour with the Minister, immediately agrees with the wisdom of this action, and entrusts the case to Wiesler. Wiesler has Dreyman’s apartment bugged, and sets up his listening post in the loft of the building.

 

By focusing attention on this one operation, Donnersmark examines the mechanisms of the entire German Democratic Republic. A title card at the beginning of the film informs us that the Stasi had nearly 100,000 employees at this point in history, and a further 200,000 informers. The goal was ‘to know everything’. The ruthlessness with which this goal is pursued is shown starkly by an opening sequence in which shots of Wiesler teaching a class of Stasi trainees are intercut with shots of one of his interrogation sessions. As he plays the recording of the interrogation to his students, he describes what he is trying to achieve: ‘The best way to establish guilt or innocence is non-stop interrogation. An innocent man becomes more angry; a guilty man becomes quiet and calm, or he cries. A liar has prepared statements; a man telling the truth can reformulate the truth.’ Donnersmark intensively researched the Stasi for four years before filming (which lasted just 37 days), including interviewing former employees and those who had been detained, in order to ensure the accuracy of the situation he portrayed. He was insistent on using original locations for such a film: notably the Stasi headquarters in Normannenstrasse and the Central Detention Centre in Hohenschönhausen.

 

They have also discussed Children of Men – Hinting at Hope and Children of Men Discussion Guide.

Man, East Germany was a horrible horrible place. I recommend this movie. Das Leben den Anderen, 2006. The repressivity and hopelesness of a totalitarian state is shown.

Cand sunteti pe punctul sa vi se cimenteze in minte stereotipul ca nemtii sunt reci, exacti si lipsiti de sentimente, sa vedeti Goodbye, Lenin! sau The Lives of Others. Veti constata cu uimire ca sunt niste oameni cu umor, care stiu sa faca haz de necaz, sa isi perceapa realist defectele si sa se abata de la reguli.

Opiniile unui clovn de Heinrich Boll se alatura acestei pledoarii. Daca va apucati s-o cititi, pregatiti-va sa va asumati rolul de psihoterapeut, instalati-va confortabil intr-un fotoliu capitonat, in timp ce, pe canapea, vocea romanului isi va depana trista poveste. Pacientul vostru e un clovn dezamagit de viata, pe care l-a parasit iubita si cu umarul si genunchiul paradite dupa un accident. Omul are probleme cu parintii, pe care nu se sfieste sa ii acuze de ipocrizie si de vina de a o fi impins pe sora sa la moarte in timpul celui de-al Doilea Razboi Mondial, are probleme cu toti cei care, sub masca religiozitatii, ascund ipocrizie, are probleme cu ipocrizia in general. Sufera amarnic dupa iubita lui, cu care a avut o relatie copilaroasa si inocenta, care insa l-a lasat pentru un catolic scortos, respectabil si plat.

Dintre afectiunile pacientului, cea care starneste cel mai pregnant interes este cea referitoare la relatiile cu parintii. Nu are furia spumeganda a lui Jeroen Browers in Rosu Ucigas, dar este la fel de neiertatoare. Scena intalnirii dintre fiul ratacitor si risipitor si tatal, figura publica instarita si de succes, este naucitoare. Are umor, deci ar trebui sa rad; are o fina observatie psihologica, deci ar trebui sa ma puna pe ganduri; ce a facut insa a fost sa ma inunde cu un fel de tristete asemanatoare cu gripa – am simtit-o in tot corpul, dar n-am putut-o localiza concret.

De cand mi-am arogat dreptul de a diseca si psihanaliza carti, nu m-am confruntat cu un final mai dificil. Eticheta de fericit fuge ca o soparla pe care incerci sa o prinzi de coada, dar nici cea de trist nu se lasa lipita.

Pentru toate bataile astea de cap, deloc dureroase, dar profunde, dau urmatorul diagnostic:

Un Nobel dat pe bune.

In The Lives of Others Wiesler begins the film as a committed Stasi man, even conducting classes for new secret police recruits about interrogation methods but cracks begin to form in his worldview as he immerses himself in the lives of the artists he is spying on. The sterility of his own overly fastidious life is highlighted as he discovers the richness in the world of the Dreyman and Christa Maria.

Donnersmarck has said about the transformation of Wiesler, “It’s not specifically just that relationship. In all these screenplay books I read, they always said you need a specific turning point for the character. I’m always weary when people swing around in their political directions. People change when there’s a continuous crisis. It’s many things that push you in the same direction. On one hand, he realises that his friend, who was always a little less intelligent and a little less loyal, is actually having a more successful career than he is. He also sees that something as sacred as a mission to uncover an enemy of the state is used to satisfy a high party functionary’s testosterone level. This is not what he signed up for.

On the other hand, he realises these enemies of the state are normal people with problems, kindness, pettiness, and everything else. Then there’s the additional factor of him experiencing art, poetry, and music in a way he never has before. It’s all of that together, throughout the entire film, that makes him an almost-accidental hero. He’s not your knight in shining armour who fights for good.”

Your life will never be as bad as this movie.  And you can be happy about that.  Unfortunately, your life will never be as awesome as this movie.  Which sucks, but it’s reality.  Neither do you have the tragedy of living near or having to talk with Larry the Cable Guy.  Nor, on the other hand, can you be as good looking as Bruce Willis or Milla Jovovich while living a life of fantasy in the near non-existent future where aliens exist (and apparently look like armadillos) and Chris Tucker is…Chris Tucker. I’m not sure where I was going with that.  I could have gone a lot of places with that.  None of them would have been good places, though.  Regardless…

Anyways, to get to the point.  I constantly compare my life to the movies I watch.  I lament the fact that my life will never (A) be as interesting or (B) successful as The Lives of Others, and sometimes  wish Danny Kaye would Court Jester his way into my world just once.   Ever since moving to Philadelphia, and probably because I ride my bicycle everywhere (primarily because  I’m too cheap to buy a car, and in no way does my concern for the environment dictate my decision but it is nice that it is a benefit) with my iPod headphones in, I have had the insane hope that one, as I am riding home from work, two rival gangs will bust out into choreographed dance/fighting a la West Side Story, or maybe even a little basketball choreography…whatever gets the youth off the streets these days.  By the way, I did not know that movie won 10 Oscars.  Since Return of the King, Ben Hur, and Titanic are the big 11 Oscar winners they seem to get all the attention, but 10 Oscars is a darn impressive feat.  And until rewatching that YouTube clip, had never noticed that Bernardo wore Converse All-Stars.  That’s just classy.  Or maybe everyone wore Converse All-Stars in the ’60s and I’m just a little young to know or understand.  Either way, classy.  I stand by my opinion.

(Ever since writing this, I’m going to start pushing the theater department at our school to do West Side Story as the spring musical.  This year they decided to do The Wiz.  I’m ambivalent.  The Wiz is apparently done every year at one of the middle schools in Philadelphia.  I have a feeling it’s overdone in urban areas.  Personal opinion.  Although I have to give the theater department props for doing The Outsiders and moving the play from the middle of nowhere middle America in the ’60s to New York City in the late ’80s.  They’re good.)

I am constantly wishing the movies I watch pop up in my own life.  In case you hadn’t clued in yet, this is the MOVIES AS ESCAPISM philosophy.  This is what I believe.  This is why I particularly hate watching documentaries.  I don’t like the world enough as it is, do I have to watch it all over again when I get home?  (NOTE:  This movie is a rare exception to the documentary rule.  Moving on…)  Watching Hoop Dreams was painful.  Crumb?  Just unnecessary.

This is why I’m not convinced by District 9.  It’s a little to preoccupied with NOT allowing the audience member to hopefully ignore the fact that it is really about apartheid to allow the audience member to watch the movie without thinking.  I like movies that make you think.  I don’t like movies that do the thinking for you.  This is also why (but for a slightly different reason) I will never like the National Treasure movies.  The National Treasure movies, unlike District 9, just tell you the answer.  District 9, instead, hammers the obvious into you with a mallet.  Neither is very comfortable or easy to watch.

Clarification: Watching movies about the harsh realities of life is OK.  I don’t know why, but it is.  Watching Year of the Quiet Sun was much nicer than any factual movie I have watched about Europe post World War II.  It isn’t a happy movie.  It isn’t an altogether kind movie.  But because I know it is fiction, maybe it is easier for me to stomach and accept, because I know it isn’t reality.   The movie doesn’t have to be harsh to be hated.  It just has to be real.  Movies, to me, weren’t made to show the world.  They were meant to, at the most, mirror the world, echo the world, re-represent the world, meant to capture our shadows on the cave, not to show our true faces.

This brings be to the review of the article (a personal favorite): Sunshine (I’ll get to Solaris another day.)

I know this is really late.  I know this is two years late.  I’m going to start actually writing about modern and relevant movies when work allows me the time to go out to the movie theater and see relevant movies.  Until then, I’ll review old favorites.

This movie I think is quite wonderful.  I think it is quite wonderful because it was probably a movie made precisely for me.  Ebert got it right when he said the movie was made for nerds. But, it’s more than a movie for nerds.  It’s a classic movie in that it devotes nothing new to the entire subgenre of movies where a crew of people go into outer space, get on each other’s nerves, and grapple with the fact that they’re on a suicide mission all while trying to be both psychological and vaguely sexy.  It doesn’t add anything new because the genre exists solely for B-grade movies.  (The exception is Solaris almost exclusively.  I don’t like Alien or Aliens.  I’ll explain that one later too, I promise.)  I’m pretty sure this movie does not try to be anything more than the best it knows it can be–a B-grade movie.  This is why Ebert will give it a 3/4.   Because that’s all it should deserve.

Fortunately, it is more than that.  It is part Science Fiction, part horror, part drama, part diatribe.  It’s like an all style and no substance movie with a little bit a substance.  Not much, but just enough to be entertaining.  I won’t bother with the plot because the plot doesn’t really matter very much.   You’ve seen it before.  Until a certain moment in the film.  Then it switches genre with one fail swoop and moves into another type of movie you’ve also seen before.  It’s interesting to manage and understand the switch.  It’s not that interesting.  But it is interesting.  What’s more interesting are the visuals, which will always win me over storyline, although the storyline isn’t terrible.  It’s a joy to watch, the visuals will win any viewer over.

This, I admit is my major downfall as a moviewatcher.  Oftentimes I’m willing to allow my obsession with great visuals overtake my practical sense of plot, pacing, and acting, none of which is lacking in Sunshine.  Did I mention this is one of my favorite films.  I’m not sure why I’m trying to make it sound so bad.  It’s not.  It’s actually really good.  Give it a chance.  Put it on your Netflix queue.  I doubt you’ll be sorry.

If you are, let me know, and let me know why.  Like my students who all seem to think an opinion ends with yes or no, I will always respond in the same way: an opinion is no good without a valid reason.  Give evidence!  That’s usually when I start raving around the classroom like a lunatic screaming incoherently about the value of justification and evidence.  That’s when all my students stop listening.  Which is fine.  Everything is still fine.

The film is an ode to the power of art and in this interview with director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck he explains what he was trying to achieve with The Lives of Others. Here is an extract:

“What we are and what we display to the world is what we choose to reveal. It is the artist, he states, who would go into those dark parts of the soul where normally you never shine any light, find that part and use it and display it in their art. And I think that holds true for writers. While writing something, I’m kind of acting out these parts in my head, and if I don’t take that from inside then it won’t be true. It just will not be true.”

All this begs the question, what is it about art that makes it so dangerous to those in power? “I think it is related to exactly that thing we were just talking about,” answers von Donnersmarck. “An authoritarian society, a totalitarian regime, will try and tell you which of those facets of your Jungian character you are going to display. They have a certain vision of what mankind should be, and this is what they try and force you to do.”

“Now comes the artist, putting you on a sort of virtual reality ride of the soul for the soul and then has you see that this [forced] reality is not what you are really about. There is no way you can force a [person] into their old way of being after they have recognized that they are not what society wants them to be. And that is very scary to a totalitarian regime, so they try to weed out the [artists] who take people on that virtual reality ride of the soul.”

“And this is what the Stasi always did. They tried to get rid of actors and writers and directors who did not stick to the government’s ideas of how people were going to be. They hated real individualism, because individualism is just far too complicated and dangerous for a [government] to deal with. Even with 300,000 police officers they couldn’t keep individualism in check. They like people, or certain groups of people, to behave in more or less the same way because then they don’t have to deal or cope with them, they can predict their behavior.”

“They hate unpredictability. They hate anything which is in any way different. Since real art encourages you to be different, encourages you to recognize that you are different and special, and that’s in a way the essence of art. I mean, art is the perfect antidote to any sort of collectivism, so it is just the natural enemy [to totalitarianism], which is why I think the art that rose to the top in the GDR for me isn’t art at all. It is something that vaguely resembles art, but it is not at all the deep kind of experience that will help you explore your soul.”

Charles Foster Kane proves money and good intentions do not a hero make.

There’s nothing I love more than a really sneaky, unpredictable, hateful and delightfully ee-viyill* villain. Unless we’re talking about antiheroes. And if we are, well, that’s a horse — or should I say jackass? — of an entirely different color.

Few things are more intriguing than characters who do that wavering, drunken dance on the line between good and bad and seem to stumble onto both sides equally at random. Those are the people, the warts-and-all sorts, we root for because they are human in their imperfections. They are us, and us real-life dwellers can’t seem to resist seeing a bit of ourselves magnified and flung up on the silver screen.

Here’s a list of 10 antiheroes who’ve made me laugh, cry and feel guilty about liking them (just a tiny bit):

1. Charles Foster Kane, “Citizen Kane” — There are many who would argue that Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) is most certainly a champion of the common man. Look again. Whatever good Kane achieves, there’s always an ulterior motive lurking in the corner: greed, the desire for control, arrogance. His ability to wrap these flaws in the cloak of good intentions makes him the quintessential, iconic antihero.

2. Alex, “A Clockwork Orange” — C.F. Kane may be an antihero for the ages, but Alex (Malcolm McDowell), the focus of Stanley Kubrick’s highly disturbing “A Clockwork Orange,” is nipping right at his heels. Or pointing a gun to the back of his head, more like. A rakehell who swigs drugged milk and patrols the streets of futuristic Britain raping women and revelling in mayhem — what’s to like about a guy like this? Alex has a few redeeming qualities that nudge him away from “villain,” but not so many that they make him good. He’s an antihero for the annals.

There are nicer people than Dee Dee -- we call them "losers."

3. Dee Dee Truitt, “The Opposite of Sex” — When a narrator describes her mother as “a loser bitch” and seduces her gay brother’s boy toy, you know you’re not in for a heart-warming tale. Savage wit, anything-but-good intentions and snarky condescension are all we get from the unflappable Dee Dee Truitt (Christina Ricci), one of the pluckiest, snidest and most irresistible characters ever created.

4. Rob Gordon, “High Fidelity” — What can you say about a bitter, broke leading man (John Cusack) so self-absorbed he’d rather stew about failed relationships than pay attention to the woman who loves him? It wouldn’t be incorrect to use words like “conceited jerk” or even “rampaging jackass” to describe Rob, a record store owner who elevates wallowing in self pity into an art. He’s not a nice guy, or even a halfway decent one, but that’s exactly why he’s such a compelling character.

5. Lester Burnham, “American Beauty” — Kevin Spacey has made a great and acclaimed career out of playing himself playing people who, uh, seem a whole lot like Kevin Spacey. Lester Burnham, a lumpish, discontent and disengaged spectator in his own life, is no exception, but he is one of the sharpest characters Spacey’s put his sarcastic stamp on. When Lester finally jolts out of his coma, we’re cheering his efforts to embrace life. Or least buy a dime bag.

5. Danny Balint, “The Believer” — “Conflicted” hardly begins to describe Danny (Ryan Gosling, fearless in his quest to take difficult parts), a violent young man who turns on his Jewish upbringing to become a fiercely antisemitic KKK member. And herein lies the contradiction: Brutish as he is, Danny’s also an educated man capable of kindness and intelligent, rational thought. It’s hard to like a character like this, but it’s equally as hard not to find him truly fascinating. 

Good and bad do battle in Gerd Wiesler.

6. Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, “The Lives of Others” – Nations that call themselves “Democratic Republics” tend to be anything but, so it seems that a man (Ulrich Mühe) who rises through the ranks of the Stasi, the German Democratic Republic’s secret police, would qualify as a villain. But the rigid, grim Gerd Wiesler finds humanity in the couple he’s ordered to survail, and soon his own humanity emerges.

7. Ray Elwood, “Buffalo Soldiers” – It’s no secret I’m mad for Joaquin Phoenix in most anything, but resistance is futile when he plays men like the manipulative, shrewd and morally flexible Ray Elwood, who tolerates other people only as long as he can use them for something. He’s a real cad, to be sure, though there are moments where flashes of real feeling peek through, and those keep us coming back for more.

8. Sherry, “SherryBaby” — As a rule Maggie Gyllenhaal doesn’t sign on for parts that have less than 37 layers of complexity, but she outdoes herself here as Sherry, a fresh-out-of-prison ex-heroin addict working to get custody of the daughter she hasn’t seen in years. She’s rude, immature, brash, selfish and confrontational, and her love for her daughter is tainted by a sense of entitlement — Sherry’s hardly her child’s beacon of hope. Yet we cannot write her off because she sees herself clearly and tries, in her small way, to change. That’s my kind of woman: a real one.

The only thing Bernie's good at? Losing. Hard.

9. Bernie Lootz, “The Cooler” – Look up synonyms for “pathetic” in Merriam-Webster and you’ll likely find photos of Bernie Lootz (William H. Macy) beside every single word. He’s unlucky to a fault, and what’s worse is that his bad luck is contagious — so much so that casino bosses use him to “cool off” gamblers on a hot streak. Yikes. There are many moments where you wonder what there is to like about this wimpy, hapless sadsack, but it all boils down to Macy, who plays Bernie as a man who accepts his faults and means well. Sometimes, that’s enough. 

*Hedley Lamar-approved pronunciation

1

On a certain day in the blue-moon month of September

Beneath a young plum tree, quietly

I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved

In my arms just like a graceful dream.

And over us in the beautiful summer sky

There was a cloud on which my gaze rested

It was very white and so immensely high

And when I looked up, it had disappeared.

2

Since that day many, many months

Have quietly floated down and past.

No doubt the plum trees were chopped down

And you ask me: what’s happened to my love?

So I answer you: I can’t remember.

And still, of course, I know what you mean

But I honestly can’t recollect her face

I just know: there was a time I kissed it.

3

And that kiss too I would have long forgotten

Had not the cloud been present there

That I still know and always will remember

It was so white and came from on high.

Perhaps those plum trees still bloom

And that woman now may have had her seventh child

But that cloud blossomed just a few minutes

And when I looked up, it had disappeared in the wind.

-Bertolt Brecht, “Remembrances of Marie A.,“ in Die Hauspostille (1927)

We were talking about Jung in class today and I have added some of his words below.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.

Carl Jung

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.

Carl Jung

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Carl Jung

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Carl Jung

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Carl Jung

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

Carl Jung

We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

Carl Jung

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Carl Jung, “On the Psychology of the Unconciousness”, 1917

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

Carl Jung

Go here to read an interview with director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. He is interviewed by Cinematical and he chat about his film, his views on filmmaking … and which actor he’d want as his commanding officer in an actual war situation.

Here’s a taste -

The central theme that I got out of The Lives of Others was change and the capacity of people to change, and I wondered if you could talk a bit about that, and how you wove that theme throughout the film.

You’re right that that’s a central theme, because I think it’s one of the big questions in life: can we change, or are we just what our horoscopes tell us that we will be? At Oxford I studied Scholastic Philosophy, which included studying the works of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas always formulates things as a statement, and then he’ll have pros and cons about them and come to his own conclusion.

In one of these he debates the question of astrology. And he actually comes to the conclusion that astrology will tell you something about your future and where you are and where you’re going — maybe even tell you exactly. And he says that is why it’s so hard to change, why change feels like swimming upstream, because you’re fighting against all the stars and all the weight of that, against the current of the universe. I think it’s important to realize that when people change it’s always a legion of things that drive the change, not just one thing.

Try the links below to find some interesting reading on The Lives of Others:

German Movie Indicts Altruism by Implication

The Lives of Others – Beyond good and evil

Mystery Man on Film

11. Julie Andrews might just be one of my favorites ever.  (Favorite what?  Favorite anything.)  The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins are up there in my list of top ten films for sure.

12. Others in my Top Ten Films list include Magic in the Water, Walk Don’t Run, The Iron Giant, 28 Days Later, The Lives of Others, La Jetée, Shallow Grave and Battle Royale.

13. I’m addicted to The Battle of the Berrics, and I’m not even a skateboarder, or know much about skateboarding.

14. My favorite thing about a skateboard video is during a slo-mo sequence, after a skateboarder lands a trick and the crew watching cheers.  In slo-mo audio, it sounds like a herd of dairy cows, or one of those mooing toys, and I like that.

15. I rarely buy into trends, no matter how comfortable they look. I don’t want to go through pictures, years from now, and shudder over what I’m wearing. I’ll be too busy shuddering over how I look weight-wise anyway.

Ulrich Mühe in The Lives of Others

Last week, we rented The Lives of Others (2007 Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film), a German drama about the GDR’s secret police monitoring artists in East Berlin. It was a powerful reminder of what life was like in East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin wall. The film was incredibly moving, the kind that stays with you. One of the best I’ve seen this year – I highly, highly recommend it.