Must Be Friday

Well, no, it's not. Not quite.

Yet, I find my mind drifting to tomorrow, and the second season premiere of Dollhouse. Miracles are rare in this day and age, much in the manner, as a friend pointed out, of phone booths. When they occur, both miracles and phone booths, we should take the time to notice, and by Joss, in the case of television, we should take the time to watch, DVR, tweet, facebook, and generally make loud our love. It's an idea.

You can listen to Ira Glass interview Joss Whedon at 826NYC. They ask for donations to help teach children to read and write. You don't have to, though, if you hate children.


Last night (I just can't seem to keep my mind on today, huh), I ventured to the Vanderbilt campus for a showing of The Marriage of Maria Braun. It's part of Vandy's International Lens series. Ebert calls it a "Great Movie." It's a German film that takes place during the years 1945-1954. A woman, Maria Braun coincidentally, gets married in the midst of Berlin falling. The Russians take her husband prisoner. She stays faithful to him, though. Even as she sleeps with an American named Bill, and even after her husband returns and ends up in prison and she embarks on an affair with a French-German who is the owner of a successful company. She is fond of these men, you understand, but she loves her husband.


After the film, a Vandy professor said Maria represented Germany's inability to mourn the past. The professor, endowed symbolically with waves of curly, white hair, said that Maria's getting into bed with these different men symbolized Germany's mad rush to align with the French, among others, in a mad pursuit to regain glory, rather than to deal with the horrors they unleashed, and had unleashed upon them.

Perhaps.

In any case, I enjoyed it's Douglas Sirkian splashes of color and melodrama, not to mention the sad, sexy, resilient, dumb, hopeful, determined performance of Hanna Schygulla as Maria. She seemed bigger than Germany to me. And I mean that, of course, in the profound, metaphoric sense. Not the literal and impossible sense.

In conclusion, tomorrow, Friday, at erm, some time, maybe eight?, watch Dollhouse. Support genius. Look for symbols. Believe in people. And talking cats. They usually know what they're talking about.



ttfn, readers.