Tuesday, October 16, 2007

There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch.

Pontificating about things we have neither read nor seen is one of our favorite activities here. (The others are cursing and being ironic.) Just in time for Christmas--or my birthday, if you're keeping track of such things--is How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read. This guy is an absolute genius. It's officially at the top of my list of books I plan to not read.

Have you ever wondered why philosophers are so scruffy? Well, neither have I. But the answer is here, in case you are now curious.

As part of our bachelor weekend, Buzzy and I saw several excellent films. (Jenn was in Vegas celebrating the Krusser's impending nuptials.)

The first, on Friday night, was The Lives of Others, which won an Oscar last year for Best Film in some inscrutable language other than English. It is about a Stasi officer in mid-1980s East Berlin who is assigned to spy on a playwright and his actress girlfriend by a thuggish government official who wants to get some dirt on the playwright so he can lock him up and shag his girlfriend. Over time, Wiesler, the Stasi officer, develops some sympathy for the couple and take some steps to protect them, at considerable risk to his future employment prospects, if not his life. I won't ruin the story for you, but it's as deeply affecting and suspenseful a movie--sorry, film (it's got subtitles!)--as I've seen in a long time. It stars the ruggedly handsome Sebastian Koch as the playwright and the fetching Martina Gedeck as the actress. Sadly, Ulrich Muhe, who's close to brilliant as Wiesler, died from stomach cancer not long after the completion of the movie. Highly recommended, as they say.

Sunday night while waiting for Jenn to fly in from Sin City, we watched Paul Verhoeven's Black Book. I'll have to admit that, while I really wanted to see this movie, I didn't have especially high expectations. It was directed, after all, by the auteur who's responsible for such aesthetic atrocities as Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Starship Troopers. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Black Book is a really darned good movie. It stars Dutch hottie Carice van Houten as a young Jewish women on the run from the Nazis (and, later, because of a misunderstanding, the resistance), and involves several inspired plot twists. It also stars the aforementioned, ruggedly handsome Sebastian Koch as the (mostly) goodhearted Nazi she falls in love with and a whole bunch of Dutch actors I was heretofore unfamilar with but who are uniformly excellent. I gather from from reading about on the interwebs--It's a series of tubes!--that Sebastian Koch and Carice van Houten are an item off stage as well. Anyway, also highly recommended.

That is all.

Posted by jwb at 11:18 AM   

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said:

Sorry, can't help you on Lessing.
at 9:44 AM     

Blogger Marty said:

Hey, by the way, Verhoeven's Star Ship Troopers is a all time classic. Still the single best portrayal of faschism on film. (It helps that the enemy is, as an alien species, already de-humanised.) In fact, I just watched it the other night with my boys, Alexander and Julian (seriously!).
at 6:16 AM     

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