jan's diary

Highly recommended. Wikipedia has more about the film. More.

Last night I saw the first Argentian Oscar winner “La Historia Oficial.” It is about a family whose wife discovers that her 3 year old child maybe was taken from her mother who was killed by the dictators. Yesterday, the writer Sábato died, 99 years of age. He was leading the investigation when Argentina returned to democracy in 1983 whose report was called “Nunca mas” (Never again). The film was grip taking. So grip taking that I don’t want to see it again.

When the war ended in Norway in 1945, the traitor Vidkun Quisling got the death penalty. The same happened to many of the top Naziz after the Nuernberg trial. What happened to the dictators in Argentina? One of the leading figures got a life in prison sentence in 1985, was released after a pardon in 1990, and again sentenced to life in prison 20 years later, in 2010.

What about the ones who accepted orders or gave orders to killing an estimated 13 thousand of their fellow Argentinian country men? As far as I know, the majority went free without any charge being raised. I would like to be wrong.

I download films from the Internet so I can see them when I please uninterrupted by commercials. But which to choose?

A friend of mine found a simple system. He would only see Oscar winners. Since I am not in love with Hollywood, I have made a slight twist. I download films that have been nominated as Best Foreign Language Film.

Last night I saw El Secreto de Sus Ojos with Ricardo Darín. It won in 2009 and with good reason.

When video shops arrived I was jubilant. Finally an opportunity to see some classics I had seen at cinema clubs or films I had missed altogether. I was wrong. The video shops did not have a shelf for classics.

Now I am jubilant for the peer-to-peer file sharing which has allowed me to load down this week “12 angry men”, “Lilies of the field”, “My dinner with Andre”, and more.

A friend of mine  had a bullet proof way of choosing which films to see. He would only see the Oscar Winners.:) A similar approach is to start with what Roger Ebert has chosen as the first 100 classical films. He writes:

I know that many people dislike subtitled films, and that few people reading this article will have ever seen a film from Iran, for example. And yet a few weeks ago at my Overlooked Film Festival at the University of Illinois, the free kiddie matinee was “Children of Heaven,” from Iran. It was a story about a boy who loses his sister’s sneakers through no fault of his own, and is afraid to tell his parents. So he and his sister secretly share the same pair of shoes. Then he learns of a footrace where third prize is . . . a pair of sneakers.

“Anyone who can read at the third-grade level can read these subtitles,” I told the audience of 1,000 kids and some parents. “If you can’t, it’s OK for your parents or older kids to read them aloud–just not too loudly.”

The lights went down and the movie began. I expected a lot of reading aloud. There was none. Not all of the kids were old enough to read, but apparently they were picking up the story just by watching and using their intelligence. The audience was spellbound. No noise, restlessness, punching, kicking, running down the aisles. Just eyes lifted up to a fascinating story. Afterward, we asked kids up on the stage to ask questions or talk about the film. What they said indicated how involved they had become.

Kids. And yet most adults will not go to a movie from Iran, Japan, France or Brazil. They will, however, go to any movie that has been plugged with a $30 million ad campaign and sanctified as a “box-office winner.” Yes, some of these big hits are good, and a few of them are great. But what happens between the time we are 8 and the time we are 20 that robs us of our curiosity? What turns movie lovers into consumers? What does it say about you if you only want to see what everybody else is seeing?