Spacetramp posted some pictures of Titan, the Saturnian sattelite to her blog yesterday. The planetary pixel pushers at JPL have done a lovely job on Titan, but I thought it needed just a bit more sharpening to see if there really were Sirens ...
Image from JPL.
I'm not liking the look of that place.
I'm gonna get and re-read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle just to be on the safe side, but come to think of it, it was a trick, wasn't it. And it wasn't Cat's Cradle - it was 2001.
Ah-Whoom!
More stuff to keep kids awake at night:
Made with a 50mm f/128 copper pinhole and flash. Think it's time to clean my sensor?
Just saw Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye Lenin! As is not often the case, "My Attorney" and I both completely enjoyed the film. Becker is part of an artistic team called X Filme that puts out sophisticated German comedies - where, according to Becker, 'the characters are not laughing.' But we laff often, because Good Bye Lenin! is funny.
| All the dialog is in a Berliner dialect where they speak with a 3:1 syllable compression, so it's a good thing they provide easily legible (although loosely translated) subtitles. |
This is both a unique historical film, but also a tour de force of homage and self reference. Overtly stated are three tips to Stanley Kubrick through the first film of Florian Lucas's video geek, Denis (as well as two other musical points that I could see.) Denis is Sancho Panza to Daniel Brühl's Alex. Alex's mission is to recreate east Berlin with Mission Impossible (the TV show, not the movie) style trickery.
In doing so he attracts many of those disaffected by the reunification process, the poorly retired neighbors, the now drunken and replaced school principal, the forgotten cosmonaut. In the end we become nostalgic for the simple life of totalitarian rule, though even the most bought in of communists, Katrin Saß's Christiane, reveals the pain it caused.
In perhaps the most blaring mirroring, Saß, an upcoming east German actress, whose career was interrupted by Germany's reunification. And I can't help but imagine that Denis is, in part made out of X Filmer, Tom Tykwer.
The American subtitled version seems to be missing these six and a half seconds, featuring gnome-girl look-alike Chulpan Kamatova's Lara in what appears to be a well fit body suit:
I suppose then, that the R rating must come from Alex's sister Ariane, played by Maria Simon, whose favorite line, whenever things go wrong - "Scheißen!"
X Filme
German Official Site
Sony's Flashy Site
Rotten Tomatoes review
Internet Movie Database listing
