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    2008/7/1

    Great Movie Experience

    You know you are watching a pretty good movie, if not a great one, when the movie got complete attention of you and most other people in the theatre.  It happened when we were watching WALL-E, closer to the end of the movie, when the female robot EVE had tried everything to fix WALL-E and nothing seems to work, there was complete silence in the theatre, a theatre jam-packed with small kids, teenagers, and parents; everyone was just so intently watching.  Obviously this kind of experience works the best in a full theatre (it's kinda easy to get that in a mostly empty theatre) but it doesn't happen for most movies.
     
    There was another moment in the movie I remember, when WALL-E was about to enter the scene (to "save the day"); while it was nothing spectacular and little suspense of who is coming in, one kid yelled out, "it's WALL-E!!".  It's funny that everyone in the theatre can hear the kid so clearly, and most people including me just had to laugh.  It almost felt like a community in the movie theatre.

    12:23 | 添加评论 | 固定链接 | 写入日志 | Thoughts
    2008/4/16

    What sets man apart from animals


    I somehow found myself reading Roger Ebert's review of a 1985 movie called Shoah. It is a documentary movie that is 9 hours long (if you can call that a movie.) It is mostly about the filmmaker interviewing people who worked in Hitler's Concentration Camps (or people who were in position of observing what happened)

    The review includes some of the interviews, and reading that alone gave me the chill, and I can understand how powerful this movie is. As Mr. Ebert stated at the beginning of the review, he was struggling to find a proper response to this film. Nevertheless, I think he found one and included it at the end of his review:

    But there is an even deeper message as well, and it is contained in the testimony of Filip Muller, the Jew who stood at the door of a crematorium and watched as the victims walked in to die. One day some of the victims, Czech Jews, began to sing. They sang two songs: "The Hatikvah" and the Czech national anthem. They affirmed that they were Jews and that they were Czechs. They denied Hitler, who would have them be one but not the other. Muller speaks:

    That was happening to my countrymen, and I realized that my life had become meaningless. (His eyes fill with tears.) Why go on living? For what? So I went into the gas chamber with them, resolved to die. With them. Suddenly, some who recognized me came up to me. . . . A small group of women approached. They looked at me and said, right there in the gas chamber . . .

    Q. You were inside the gas chamber?

    A. Yes. One of them said: "So you want to die. But that's senseless. Your death won't give us back our lives. That's no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering and to the injustice done to us."

    And that is the final message of this extraordinary film. It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness. In it, Claude Lanzmann (the filmmaker) celebrates the priceless gift that sets man apart from animals and makes us human, and gives us hope: the ability for one generation to tell the next what it has learned.


    It just happened that (by chance) I was having a discussion with a friend earlier today on this question, what sets man apart from animals? I think what Mr. Ebert said is as good an answer as any... that priceless gift.

    MSN Sync from http://www.lightrelay.com/?p=98

    1:27 | 添加评论 | 固定链接 | 写入日志 | Thoughts
    2007/11/5

    We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect

    I heard this song called "Perfect", by Alanis Morissette this past Sunday (at church, of all places), and the last line of the song is "We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect."

    Many Asian kids can relate to this song because it is about how parents push theirs kids to be better, to try harder.  But I do think that's not exactly how parents feel; I suspect the song is coming from the children's point of view, thinking their parents will only love them if they are perfect.

    So how do parents really think?  As a single guy, what do I know about that?  As always, I can only draw "experiences" from movies.  The song reminds me of the movie "The Joy Luck Club", a movie about 4 pairs of Chinese mother/daughters.  Most memoriable scene for me is when one of the daughters complains to her mother, that she always expects the best from her daughter.  Her mother replies, "I never expect, only hope for the best."  That is probably the first time I see how parents feel.  Like most parents, their love for their child is unconditional (or close to unconditional), it's not when children becoming perfect, but they certainly hope they can be closer and closer to perfection.  So when children feel that their parents are expecting, instead of hoping, they don't feel the love, and hence, a lot like Morissette's song.

    So how does all this related to church? We know that God's love for us is unconditional.  And we are to follow God's will, that He has a plan for us, to be more and more like Christ.  He has even prepared the plan for us, and we are "expected" to follow.  Maybe in the same way, we feel God's love for us is not unconditional, because whenever we are expected (or even demanded) we don't think it's love.  Maybe it helps if we think that God hopes for the best for us, just like the Chinese mother hopes for the best for her daughter; we are just encouraged to follow God's will, strongly encouraged.

    MSN Sync from http://www.lightrelay.com/?p=88

    16:44 | 添加评论 | 固定链接 | 写入日志 | Thoughts