Cinema

Coincidence

Cinema, Thought Provoking, Travel

I just rewatched “Before Sunset”, the sequel to one of my favourite films “Before Sunrise”. I was struck during the dialogue that Ethan Hawke’s character notes that 6 months after a life-changing event whether it was winning the lottery or becoming a paraplegic, a person reverts to the psychological state that they inhabited before the event. Then I read the latest post by Tim Harford this evening.

It’s quite possible that our image of these possible futures is not very good. As the psychologist Dan Gilbert points out, you might think that winning the Lottery would make you happier than being permanently paralysed from the waist down, but the empirical evidence suggests that this is just a failure of imagination: paraplegics are not, in fact, less happy than people who have won the Lottery.

By the way, the film is definitely better the second time around. I wish that I could see Before Sunrise again right now. My favourite part is at the end of the film where they show all of the places in Vienna where the story unfolded the next morning, deserted. I felt that way about Prague for a long time.

Serial Killers

Arts, Books, Cinema

I’ve just finished A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger and saw Zodiac in the cinema last week. Both are set around the same time, 60’s and 70’s about serial killers who were never completely identified although both pieces tend to point to an individual as being responsible for each spree. Both works are by respected and talented individuals but in both cases I was left not being completely satisfied with either.

The Bridge

Cinema

While listening to The Observer film podcast, the end interview with a director called Eric Steele jumped to my attention. He has made a documentary film about sucide jumpers from the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco. Basically, they placed cameras watching the bridge over one year watching what occured there. It seems like the most fascinating idea for a documentary and one that I am looking forward to seeing in an eerie way. There is interesting discussion and review of the film on Metroblogging.

Then, the first suicide — the entire theater gasped when an average looking guy hopped up on the orange railing, sat for a minute, and loped off to splash into the water. Next, they interviewed local kite surfers who were there in the water below at that minute, and their mental process around realization, then action, and living with what they saw and how they reacted. Because this film was ultimately just as much about the people surviving (as in those left behind), as it was about the people who killed themselves. A lot of questions were raised, some were not answered. Parents talked about knowing it would happen; then we see the son leap and sail down into the water like a toy. The more the parents and friends spoke, it was easy to see that everyone in the film is really doing the best they can to live with all these unanswered questions. But I think perhaps the biggest unanswered question is why, when they filmed for a continuous year, did only two bystanders lift a finger to stop someone from jumping.