What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

Well this is a treat. Guy Morant who, along with Kristen Lagadec, translated What a Way to Go into French (which I am busily adding now to the DVD master!), just sent me a translation of my latest blog! So here it is! I didn’t add in all the links, as my [...]

Nine percent into the year now, this phrase keeps leaping at me from behind the bushes of my mind. It comes from the movie version of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two, a film directed by Peter Hyams in 1984. I remembered liking this sequel quite a bit at the time I first saw it, [...]

When I watch a movie, my thinking always wanders to the same few questions.
How is this a story for our time?
What does this film tell us about ourselves, our deepest feelings, our secret thoughts, our invisible yearnings?

And how conscious are the filmmakers themselves about these processes?
Because we seem to be living in a time of [...]

True adulthood, or psychological maturity, has become an uncommon achievement in Western and Westernized societies, and genuine elderhood nearly nonexistent. Interwoven with arrested personal development, and perhaps inseparable from it, our everyday lives have drifted vast distances from our species’ original intimacy with the natural world and from our own uniquely individual natures, our souls. [...]

Just open your eyes,
And realize, the way it’s always been.
The Moody Blues, The Balance
I notice, back home now, having spent two and a half weeks in dialogue and interview with Sally and Rocco, that I have a feeling of deep wariness. This is what plays in my head: I fear that Rocco will walk [...]