Menu – mince and dumplings with peas and some mash
Film One - Wag the Dog
Why does a dog wag its tail? Because a dog is smarter than its tail.
If the tail were smarter, the tail would wag the dog.
And thus starts a film about the relationship between politics and the media, truth and perception, the war that never was and the peace that never went away, and as one tag line for the film reads “truth, justice and other special effects”.
The one line that sticks with me though is when one of the characters says that “a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow”. Still pondering whether that does what it says on my tin…
Now this is where (apart from the dumplings) things went slightly off the usual route. Wag the Dog is only 93 minutes long. So at 9.20ish we were sort of wondering whether we should quit there – but no, the other film we had from Amazon was only 83 minutes so we decided to dive on in. And what a film it was.
Film Two - Koyaanisqatsi
The IMDB link is here and on Wikipedia as well.
Now this made it onto the rental list courtesy of Gareth Higgins mentioning it as a “God” film in his thematic exploration of How Movies Helped Save My Soul: Finding Spiritual Fingerprints in Culturally Significant Films.
A film that is so hard to describe I urge you just to go and immerse yourself in it – the verb “watch” just ain’t even getting close here…
Brilliant time-lapse photography, weird and wonderful overviews of both the wilder sides of the planet and human behaviour/ environments, no dialogue and a soundtrack by Philip Glass. Apparently it’s been often mimicked but never bettered (think Madonna’s Ray of Light video).
I feel sure that this will be cropping up in a Sanctus service or some such at some point… In the meantime I’ll leave you with this – the definition of the title:
koy.aa.nis.qat.si (Hopi) [n]
1. crazy life
2. life out of balance
3. life disintegrating
4. life in turmoil
5. a way of life that calls for another way of living
1 comment:
Koyaanisqatsi is a daaamn good film.
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