God, How I Love Talking About Me.

Okey dokey, so yeah, I've got lots of free time these days.

I've been batting around the whole back to college thing, and my little heart is all set on going to do film studies, so I'm hoping that pans out. Currently though, I'm just... taking it easy.
I'm living lazy.
I'm inactive.
I don't sleep much.

My job decided they were going to leave the country, and after a brief negotiation in which they offered to take me with them and I declined as graciously as possible, they left with a minimum of fuss.

Now, I'm looking to go back to college, and the state is fairly happy to help me with fees and so on. But there's a catch kiddo, there's always one, look out for it, the catch here is I have to be unemployed for several months to whet the state's appetite.


So... I'm really lazy... and it seems I can't work for a few months. When I first thought it was looking like I'd have to do this, I started referring ahead to it as "The Golden Time."

Now...
Well.
I'm sorry, but I have to admit it's marvellous. I'm kind of free to sit and be useless all the time. I have lots of time to do things like write on this blog, which can be observed by how I haven't written in it in a couple of months. I spend up to an hour in the video store renting three movies, and watch them all in a day. Y'know, some people kinda like their own company, but I'm thinking of proposing to mine. It turns out we like all the same stuff.

Hey lets talk about stuff I like. It's my blog, I can if I want to.

So recently I watched M, a Fritz Lang movie.
Okay, I'm not exactly the king of intellectual film watchers, but I do sometimes manage to appreciate a truly great movie.

M is in German, it's long, it's from 1931, and it's... incredibly accessible.
It's a little slow in the beginning, but it very quickly becomes one of the most interesting moral debates I've ever seen on film. It's full of clever shots and cuts that would have seemed wildly innovative if I'd seen them in a fifties movie, and Peter Lorre is a central figure, an odious child killer, and he's incredible. His performance is remarkable, everywhere from cringe-inducing to oddly sympathetic at the least expected moments, Lorre captures a tortured soul with incredible truthfulness. However horrible he may be, his character is on some level suffering, and Fritz Lang and Lorre do not allow us to ignore this.
Don't get me wrong, I can't count how many insufferably arty and utterly joyless films I've seen described with terms like "The director never allows us to become comfortable"... but sometimes a description like that isn't far off the mark.

M keeps you guessing, keeps you thinking, and doesn't let you pick a platitude and stick by it. You have to watch to the end, you have no other choice, no other way of making your mind up.

Plenty has been said about its political side, it was an indictment of Germany's decline into fascism, and was banned by the mid thirties. The wonderful thing for me though, is that this indeed intensely topical political film still feels incredibly topical now, over seventy years later.


Wow, that post started out about me, and ended up being mostly about a movie...

Ah well you're better off, I was only going to talk about sleep deprivation, laziness and tea anyway.