Posts tagged right
“Amour” Is Difficult, but Thought-Provoking
Feb 10th
“Difficult, but Thought-Provoking”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Amour means “love,” “affection,” or “passion” in French, and although the film has dialogue in French with English subtitles and it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Feature, it was not submitted by France, but rather by Austria.
The reason is that the director, Michael Haneke, is Austrian, not French, and so one could say that not everything is at it seems with this film, which goes for the simple story itself.
The film was also nominated for four other Academy Awards, Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, and Actress, and in 2012 it won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, which suggests that this is a well-respected, classy film.
But not everything is as it seems.
For example, you might believe you already know how it ends from reading about it and especially from seeing the opening scene.
But there is much more to it than that an old woman dies.
The woman is Anne, she has a stroke at the beginning of the film, and when she returns home, she says to her husband, Georges, “Promise me one thing. Never take me back to the hospital.”
She is partially paralyzed on the right side of her body, and as Georges begins to care for her at home and as Anne’s condition becomes worse, keeping that promise becomes more and more difficult.
The action occurs almost entirely inside their apartment in Paris, and although other characters come and go, the events consist mostly of Georges’s problems taking care of Anne as her physical condition gets worse.
It sounds boring, doesn’t it, especially since you believe you already know how it is going to end.
But not everything is as it seems.
For example, there are a couple of scenes that end with a planned shock to the audience, and one you might not have seen coming. There are also a couple of scenes that have to have been either fantasizing by one of the characters or the result of the director and screenwriter playing with the audience.
However, after the film is over, you realize that thinking about these scenes adds depth and meaning to the film.
In other words, keep remembering that not everything is as it seems with this award-winning film.
Amour is difficult to watch, but also very thought-provoking.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
My Cold, Dead Fingers The Naked Curmudgeon by Dan Culberson
Dec 22nd
Here’s what gets me.
Does it have to take an English major to explain the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution and put to rest this unjustifiable crutch of the right-wing, gun-toting fanatics and their conservative supporters?
For those of you who don’t remember, Amendment II states “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Even for those of you who do remember, Amendment II states “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
That is what it says word for word, comma for comma, capitalization for capitalization. Notice that the subject is “Militia,” the verb is “shall not be infringed,” and the sentence becomes “A well regulated Militia shall not be infringed.”
“What about the bits between commas?” you say? Those are two appositional phrases, and an apposition is “a grammatical construction in which a noun or pronoun is followed by another that explains it.”
The subject, a noun (See how it works?), is followed by “being necessary to the security of a free State,” and it is followed by “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” in order to explain “a well regulated Militia,” the subject of the sentence.
The subject cannot be “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” because you cannot put a single comma between the subject and the verb of a sentence. You cannot write “The dog, ran around the yard.” You can write “The dog, being frightened by the gunfire, ran around the yard,” because now we have two commas separating the subject and the verb. You can also write “The dog, being frightened by the gunfire, the pet of the neighbor, ran around the yard.”
That sentence is not “The pet of the neighbor, ran around the yard,” because that would be ungrammatical, just as “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” is ungrammatical and therefore not the sentence of Amendment II.
“The right of the people to keep and bear Arms” is an apposition that explains the subject, “a well regulated Militia,” just as the other apposition, “being necessary to the security of a free State,” does. It is a “Militia” that is “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” which is necessary to the security of a free State and which shall not be infringed.
In other words, the citizens of the United States have the right to keep and bear Arms in “a well regulated Militia,” not to stockpile weapons at home and to carry a gun around with them in some Old West mentality.
And what did the sheriff in the Old West do to maintain order? Do the words “Check your guns at the door” strike a familiar note? That didn’t mean “Inspect your guns to ensure that they are in proper working order.” That meant “Turn your guns in at the door. It’s too dangerous for you to carry guns here.”
Now, the possibility of everyone having a concealed weapon might deter a few criminal acts, but the probability that hotheads and teenagers carrying a weapon could use it in a moment of unbridled emotion is far greater.
Sir William Blackstone (1723-80), a British jurist and Oxford instructor who was the first at a British university to teach English law as opposed to Roman law (See how those appositions work?), wrote in his great work Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.”
I believe it is better that ten crimes be committed than one innocent victim be killed by a convenient handgun.
Luke Woodham, a teenager in Pearl, Mississippi, who is spending the rest of his life in prison for murdering his mother and two fellow students in October 1997 when he was 16, kept a map on his bedroom wall with the slogan “One Nation Under My Gun.” Do we want our immature, impressionable children growing up and believing this heinous claim?
We used to see so-called Amendment II supporters brag “I’ll give up my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”
After a moment of rage, I don’t want those cold, dead fingers to be mine.
I rest my case.