What I Did On My Vacation

Grade a lot, really.

But that doesn't make for such a hot blog entry, so let's talk movies. I got to see a couple big Oscar winners, and pulled off a "Dina" yesterday.

The "Dina"? My advisor from UT days, Dina Iordanova, told me once that at that stage of my academic career I should be watching two features a day to get me up to speed. At the time, I was trying to fill huge gaps in my Central European cinema experience. These days, I just feel like I'm scrambling to fill huge gaps everywhere. That's what education is supposed to do, right? Help you know what you don't know?

Last night was a double-feature for today's COMM 371 (Global Cinema) class: Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love (2000). Both are beautiful, achingly sad films--just the thing for students on spring break! Whoops.

(GRATUITOUS ASIDE: My senior year, spring break was a road trip with the Gustie hordes to South Padre, TX. Somehow there on the beach I was reading both Children of the Arbat for Russian/Soviet history and The Cider House Rules for Curriculum II Senior Sem. Both great books--but lugging them around in hardcover because I got them out of the library rather than buying the paperbacks was not the best idea if mine that week. It was also not the worst--I kid you not.)

From Netflix, we got in No Country For Old Men (2007), which got the Best Picture Oscar last month. Man, talk about brutal. The nice thing about watching films at home is that sometimes when things get to be too much, you can just hit pause and walk away. We actually broke the film up: two viewings over three nights, taking a night off between, thank you very much. Javier Bardem was awesome as the baddie--but after working with Charles Ramírez Berg's book Latino Images in Film in COMM 300 (Media, Minorities, & Cultural Diversity), I can't help but see him as the latest incarnation of the bordertown bandito. *sigh*

Finally, The Counterfeiters (2006), the Foreign-Language Oscar winner from Austria (see previous blog entry on COMM 371's successful "collective intelligence" pick of this film to win--especially you COMM 396 folks reading Jenkins!). I would like to go on record to say that I was wrong to think it was going to be so very apologetic--the film was gritty and even brutal at times, but in the right ways (I got a particular shock from a scene set at a quarry camp outside Saltzberg we'd visited as a family back in '98).

I'd double-dog-dared my 371 students to go see a foreign-language film in the theater this past week, after their midterm exam. I did my bit, darn it. There's no way I could rally to see the complete Berlin Alexanderplatz (all 15 hours or whatever!) Easter weekend, so this was a good compromise.

So now spring break is over...the final push for graduation begins!