Das Leben der Anderen

I was just reading a new blog from my good friend Suzanne, called Wading In, in which she is beginning to detail her journey through classes at the Episcopal Divinity School. Her first post is very good and I think the subsequent posts will also be very enlightening. She is only the second of my friends and acquaintances who I happen to know are blogging actively. (The first one is Dave over at It's Not a Lecture.)

So, anyway, I got to thinking about going back to my blog and typing something, and here it is.

I'm signed up for an intro to screenwriting, starting this week. I had thought about making a film over several years, or recording a CD, but I often preferred the works of other people. I still have some ideas... well, they're not ideas. More like scenes or images, and they don't really add up to a story, but I think they're moving enough on their own to justify having a story, or not having a story but just a timeline of connected events.

It's like this movie I saw recently, Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). It's a great movie, and it sheds some light on the warrantless wiretapping that was going on in East Germany, back before the wall fell. Some actors had actually lived in East Germany at that time, and they provided a great deal of input, so a lot of the detail in the film was pretty accurate, according to them.

Anyway, the surveillance, though a large part of the film's story, was not the central theme for me. And it wasn't the eroticism as the marketing "geniuses" at Sony would have you believe from reading the back of the DVD case. (Not the reason I watched the film, either. I'm no teenager.) For me, it was the journey of this one guy in the film. I don't want to give any details, but it all came down to the end of the film. Many times, in the films I recall most often, the end is the most important part.

I didn't know at what point I started bawling. Maybe it was the last line of the film. The last frozen image before the fade-out. Maybe the music as the credits began to roll. Maybe it was the combination of all three. But everything that happened in that film must have contributed to that point. If you just watched the ending without the rest of the film... watched the transaction, heard those three small words... it would be just nothing. But I watched from beginning to end, and I became a wreck. I couldn't believe it. I just could not believe it, my reaction to this.

So I got this screenwriting thing. We'll see how far I get.

Ever wonder why...?: Computers in Hollywood Films

What must be staggering is the number of films and TV shows that contain scenes of computers that make bleeping and blooping sounds every single time something changes on the monitor. Hollywood PCs have to be the noisiest in the world.