This morning I had a meeting with a student and we discussed his work…of course…but also movies and books. I mentioned that I have not recently seen movies that have really impacted me in any significant way. He suggested several that he had liked and I tried to reciprocate, but I think that I should have a sitdown with imdb soon and try to make a list of the movies I really liked. The student is definitely too young to have seen some of the “classics” that moved me as a student, but movies are forever, of course. Perhaps a little hard to get hold of, sometimes. When I was a young student, I remember waiting for the release of “Trois couleurs”. I wonder whether I would still like those movies. I saw them once, perhaps twice, 15 years ago. Was it just pretense, or was I deeply moved. Not to tears necessarily. But I want to know that the director is speaking to me, to someone, to himself perhaps. I want to see life at the end of the tunnel, instead of just detecting the dim lighting of movie factory. I want to know that there is intelligence on the other side of the screen.

While discussing movies, I realized that the same is true of books. Maybe to a lesser extent, because it seems easier to produce a mindless movie these days, than to write a mindless book. But I have not read a good, GOOD book for a while. Perhaps I should just read more.

One of the movies we discussed is “The Prestige”. It is nothing much, nice and simple. But it is shot carefully and gracefully. The two leading actors are OK I suppose, but David Bowie steals the show in any case. But the movie has beautiful atmosphere and mechanisms, such as the diary inside the diary. Just a small script device, but neat and clean. I have not read the book, but I suspect it may be one case where the movie outshines the original material. At least, that is the impression I got from watching an interview with the writer. He seemed a little bewildered and surprised that the movie turned out as well as it did.