Film Competition Quotes

Grab the work when it comes, my man. Your competition is now a fourteen-year-old in pajamas with the username Truth-ninja-12 who believes fact-checking a story is reading his subject’s Twitter feed. Be afraid.

Actually, I'm really quite vain about the whole problem because I figure there is no competition - I am what I am, and either I am needed as that or I'm not suitable anyway.

[On Dr. Strangelove]: My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. [...] What could be more absurd than the very idea of two mega powers willing to wipe out all human life because of an accident, spiced up by political differences that will seem as meaningless to people a hundred years from now as the theological conflicts of the Middle Ages appear to us today?

If you want to work for Vogue, produce films, or open a restaurant, you had better get immense psychological reward from your gig, as the comp, and returns on your efforts, will likely suck. Competition will be fierce, and even if you manage to get in, you'll be easily replaceable, as there are always younger, hipper candidates nipping at your heels. Very few high-school graduates dream of working for Exxon, but a big firm in a large sector would give you a career trajectory with regular promotions a sexy industry won't.

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

I don’t like the idea of awards for artistic things. They’re not created for the purpose of competition; they’re made to fulfill an artistic itch and hopefully entertain. I’m not interested in any group’s pronunciamento as to which film is the best film of the year, or the best book, or the Most Valuable Player.

Jerome doesn't have a clue. He in fact avoids the poets, with their petty feuds and righteous poverty. Endlessly competitive and introspective, they live in dumpy slum apartments and would knife each other for $5. Jerome prefers the painters and the film-makers who live in Soho and Tribeca. There's money there, at least the things they fight about are real.

Everything I had done up to this point in my life was live: live TV, live stage, live competitions. Film is different. Whether you get it right or you get it wrong, you’re still going to do it over and over again. I was doing a dance number and I wasn’t happy with how it was turning out. The old perfectionist in me came out; I was frustrated and angry with myself for messing it up. The director came up to me and said, “Derek, calm down. We’re going to do at least twelve takes of this to get the camera angles.” Oh.

Asked me what?” Just the sound of his voice twists my stomach into a knot of unpleasant emotions like guilt, sadness, and fear. And longing. I might as well admit there’s some of that, too. Only it has too much competition to ever win out. I watch as Peeta crosses to the table, the sunlight from the window picking up the glint of fresh snow in his blond hair. He looks strong and healthy, so different from the sick, starving boy I knew in the arena, and you can barely even notice his limp now. He sets a loaf of fresh-baked bread on the table and holds out his hand to Haymitch. “Asked you to wake me without giving me pneumonia,” says Haymitch, passing over his knife. He pulls off his filthy shirt, revealing an equally soiled undershirt, and rubs himself down with the dry part. Peeta smiles and douses Haymitch’s knife in white liquor from a bottle on the floor. He wipes the blade clean on his shirttail and slices the bread. Peeta keeps all of us in fresh baked goods. I hunt. He bakes. Haymitch drinks. We have our own ways to stay busy, to keep thoughts of our time as contestants in the Hunger Games at bay. It’s not until he’s handed Haymitch the heel that he even looks at me for the first time. “Would you like a piece?” “No, I ate at the Hob,” I say. “But thank you.” My voice doesn’t sound like my own, it’s so formal. Just as it’s been every time I’ve spoken to Peeta since the cameras finished filming our happy homecoming and we returned to our real lives. “You’re welcome,” he says back stiffly. Haymitch tosses his shirt somewhere into the mess. “Brrr. You two have got a lot of warming up to do before showtime.” He’s right, of course. The audience will be expecting the pair of lovebirds who won the Hunger Games. Not two people who can barely look each other in the eye. But all I

Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.

Dogs, in fact, were perfect heroes: unknowable but accessible, driven but egoless, strong but tragic, limited by their muteness and animal vulnerability. Humans played heroes in films, too, but they were more complicated to admire because they were so particular—too much like us or too much unlike us or too much like someone we knew. Dogs, on the other hand, have the talent of seeming to understand and care about humans in spite of not being human and perhaps are better at it because of that difference. They are compassionate without being competitive, and there is nothing in their valor that threatens us, no demand for reciprocity. As Lee knew very well, a dog can make you feel complete without ever expecting much in return.

recorded his family’s experiences year after year. He did so in such an entertaining and original manner that his films have gradually become classics. In Disneyland Dream, the family – father, mother, and three children aged between four and eleven – enters a competition sponsored by the then-new Scotch tape. The winners are to be treated to a trip – by airplane! – to the recently opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Lo and behold the youngest child, Danny, wins first prize with the indomitable slogan: ‘I like “Scotch” brand cellophane tape because when some things tear then I can just use it.’ Excitement all round, and the Barstows’ neighbours step out into their front gardens to wave the family off. Then comes the thrilling

To understand Bashō’s place in Japanese poetry, it’s useful to have some sense of the literary culture he entered. The practice of the fine arts had been central to Japanese life from at least the seventh century, and virtually all educated people painted, played musical instruments, and wrote poems. In 17th century Japan, linked-verse writing was as widespread and popular as card games or Scrabble in mid-20th-century America. A certain amount of rice wine was often involved, and so another useful comparison might be made to playing pool or darts at a local bar. The closest analogy, though, can be found in certain areas of online life today. As with Dungeons and Dragons a few years ago, or Worlds of War and Second Life today, linked verse brought its practitioners into an interactive community that was continually and rapidly evolving. Hovering somewhere between art-form and competition, renga writing provided both a party and a playing field in which intelligence, knowledge, and ingenuity might be put to the test. Add to this mix some of street rap’s boundary-pushing language, and, finally, the video images of You-Tube. Now imagine the possibility that a “high art” form of very brief films might emerge from You-Tube, primarily out of one extraordinarily talented young film-maker’s creations and influence. In the realm of 17th-century Japanese haiku, that person was Basho.

If this is true—if solitude is an important key to creativity—then we might all want to develop a taste for it. We’d want to teach our kids to work independently. We’d want to give employees plenty of privacy and autonomy. Yet increasingly we do just the opposite. We like to believe that we live in a grand age of creative individualism. We look back at the midcentury era in which the Berkeley researchers conducted their creativity studies, and feel superior. Unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s, we hang posters of Einstein on our walls, his tongue stuck out iconoclastically. We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We “think different” (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign). But the way we organize many of our most important institutions—our schools and our workplaces—tells a very different story. It’s the story of a contemporary phenomenon that I call the New Groupthink—a phenomenon that has the potential to stifle productivity at work and to deprive schoolchildren of the skills they’ll need to achieve excellence in an increasingly competitive world. The New Groupthink elevates teamwork above all else. It insists that creativity and intellectual achievement come from a gregarious place. It has many powerful advocates. “Innovation—the heart of the knowledge economy—is fundamentally social,” writes the prominent journalist Malcolm Gladwell. “None of us is as smart as all of us,” declares the organizational consultant Warren Bennis,

Eugenic rhetoric thus remained dependent on the body exterior as a powerful “material metaphor” for mysterious genetic processes. The desirable stock of the “fit” was imagined in terms of whiteness, beauty, and physical fitness; embodied in the winners of the AES’s “Better Babies” and “Fitter Families” competitions; invoked in books like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), which described the progenitors of good American stock as “splendid conquistadores” of Nordic heritage with “absolutely fair skin” and “great stature”; and visualized in eugenic displays.37

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I was reviews editor, which I was hopeless at seeing as it required organisation, decisions, delegation and ability to decipher which singles, albums, films, videos, concerts, books and competitions were best suited to the viewers from an actual Alpine avalanche of Jiffy bags permanently engulfing the reviews desk. This was music industry boom time,

The film stopped and Colin Jackson was asked for his opinion. After Colin refuted the nonsense with a scientific study – which he was actually a part of – that found that both black and white athletes have the ‘fast twitch’ muscle that is apparently the ‘key’ to sprinting, the commentator’s response was: ‘But are we at the point now where if you are a very talented athlete at fourteen/fifteen/sixteen, and you are white, you are almost institutionally programmed to think that you won’t be able to compete at the highest level in the sprint?’ This is a very revealing question from a white public figure, because when black people assert that representation is important, that having role models you can relate to and who look like you is helpful, they are often accused of making excuses, playing the race card or wanting special treatment. Yet here, before the 200 metres final, was a public service broadcaster asserting that, actually, it does matter, and that seeing black people win, in a competition that no white people have ever been barred by law from entering, or in any way discriminated from participating in, could still discourage white teenagers from bothering to even try. Wow.

The film stopped and Colin Jackson was asked for his opinion. After Colin refuted the nonsense with a scientific study – which he was actually a part of – that found that both black and white athletes have the ‘fast twitch’ muscle that is apparently the ‘key’ to sprinting, the commentator’s response was: ‘But are we at the point now where if you are a very talented athlete at fourteen/fifteen/sixteen, and you are white, you are almost institutionally programmed to think that you won’t be able to compete at the highest level in the sprint?’ This is a very revealing question from a white public figure, because when black people assert that representation is important, that having role models you can relate to and who look like you is helpful, they are often accused of making excuses, playing the race card or wanting special treatment. Yet here, before the 200 metres final, was a public service broadcaster asserting that, actually, it does matter, and that seeing black people win, in a competition that no white people have ever been barred by law from entering, or in any way discriminated from participating in, could still discourage white teenagers from bothering to even try. Wow.

Cu toate că testosteronul încă ne mai curge prin vene și că uneori ne face plăcere să ne luăm la pumni cu câte un necunocut care s-a uitat chiorâș la noi, în ființa umană prevalează alte atribute (valori și principii) care domolesc acele tendințe vechi și, în aparență, de nestăvilit. Altruismul, prietenia, respectul, munca în echipă și sacrificiul cu bună știință în favoarea idealurilor, toate acestea se opun agresivității oarbe și haotice. Este adevărat că nu prea ne dăm silința să le cultivăm ori să le punem în practică, însă important este că mijloacele există și că ne sunt la îndemână. Biologia nu ne poate explica decât anumite aspecte ale comportamentului nostru, fără a-l și justifica. Logica umană are nevoie de o bază etică și morală, adică de umanizare. După cum spunea Jung, „să-i permitem războinicului interior să se manifeste întrucât numai așa îl putem depăși”. Dacă lipsa dorinței de a obține glorie poate reduce proporțiile războaielor și dacă respectul favorizează crearea condițiilor indispensabile pentru atenuarea agresivității, atunci ce ne împiedică să ne schimbăm? De ce nu-l putem înfrânge pe mercenarul din noi? Răspunsul este simplu: cultura patriarhalistă preamărește și rpomovează o imagine agresivă și distorsionată a bărbatului: „Dacă nu ți se dă de bună voie, atunci ia-l cu forța.” Educația realizată în societate nu recomandă depășirea stadiului de războinic, ci mai curând îl glorifică și conservă într-o fază primitivă. Indiferent de vârstă, majoritatea activităților cotidiene ale bărbatului gravitează în jurul unor înfruntări fundamental competitive și/sau distructive. Dacă am analiza îndeaproape conținutul anumitor filme, jocuri pe calculator, haine bărbătești, sporturi rezervate bărbaților, jucării și benzi desenate, am observa că în toate aceste cazuri apologia violenței masculine se află pe cele mai înalte culmi ale sale. Iată cum se păstrează în viață acel spirit de prădător care se presupune că sălășluiește înlăuntrul fiecărui băiat. Răpăitul tobelor încă mai răsună.

The intellectual life as portrayed in this film has four key features: It is a form of the inner life of a person, a place of retreat and reflection. As such it is withdrawn from the world, where “the world” is understood in its (originally Platonic, later Christian) sense as the locus of competition and struggle for wealth, power, prestige, and status. It is a source of dignity—made obvious in this case by the contrast to Renée’s low status as an unattractive working-class woman without children and past childbearing age. It opens space for communion: it allows for profound connection between human beings.

It has been well established that television, films, and magazines distort people’s standards and perception of beauty.748 The photoshopped and filtered photos online and in magazines create an unrealistic expectation of beauty that is unattainable by anyone.749 Pornography has even more devastating effects on viewers. Watching porn literally rewires the brain in what is called neuroplastic change, and gradually affects the release of dopamine. Psychiatrist Norman Doidge says, “Because plasticity is competitive, the brain maps for new, exciting images increased at the expense of what had previously attracted them.”750 What this means is that frequent porn watchers develop a “tolerance” similar to drug users, and then require harder (and weirder) porn in order for the same amount of dopamine to be released.751 Many regular porn watchers become unable to maintain erections during sex with an actual person, similar to how a drug addict is unable to get a good buzz from an average dose of whatever their drug of choice is.

he became obsessed with crosswords after seeing Patrick Creadon’s documentary Wordplay, the 2006 film about the world of competitive crosswords that became one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time.

With her strong GPA and merely quite good scores, busy athletic schedule, and character-building volunteer efforts, Portia Nathan’s application would have left this room with a fatal designation of Academic 3/Non-Academic 4, meaning that in the real world her scholastic skills were solid, but in Princeton’s supercharged applicant pool they were unremarkable, and that although she had been busy within her school community, she had not been a leader within that community (NonAc 3) or distinguished herself at the state level (NonAc 2), let alone accomplished something on a national or international scale (NonAc 1). NonAc 1’s, of course, were rather thin on the ground, even in Princeton’s applicant pool. They were Olympic athletes, authors of legitimately published books, Siemens prizewinners, working film or Broadway actors, International Tchaikovsky Competition violinists, and, yes, national judo champions, and they tended to be easy admits, provided they were strong students, which they usually were.

Efficiencies of PV cells have risen from less than five percent during the early 1960s, when the first modules were deployed on satellites, to twenty-five percent for high-purity silicon crystals in the laboratory, but the field efficiencies are around fifteen percent. PV films, made of amorphous silicon (or gallium arsenide, cadmium telluride, or copper indium diselenide), have reached as much as twenty-two percent in the laboratory, but deliver eleven to thirteen percent in field applications. Declining costs of PV cells have made them particularly competitive in sunny locations where their capacity factor can average twenty five percent (compared to just over ten percent in Germany).

I really want my roots to come through in this meal," I said, very conscious of the cameras filming everything I was saying. "I want to make sure viewers and diners"----and investors, please, especially investors----"see everything that the food of my ancestors can be. That Jewish food isn't just matzah ball soup and pastrami sandwiches." So it was with that attitude I went about planning my menu. "I'm thinking my first dish is going to be a tribute to my grandmother," I said. "She was very into chopped liver. I hated it as a kid, for good reason: her chopped liver was bland and gritty." Grandma Ruth hissed in my ear, but I ignored her. "I want to make good chopped liver on good bread with something vinegary and acidic to cut through it. Maybe some kind of pickled fruit, because the judges really loved my pickled cherries in the last round." "How about kumquats?" suggested Kaitlyn. "Or gooseberries?" "I like gooseberries," said Kel. I made a note. "We'll see what they have at the store, since we'll be on a budget. With the second course, Ashkenazi cooking has so many preserved and sometimes weird fish dishes. Think gefilte fish and pickled herring. I've wanted to do my special gefilte fish this whole competition and never got a chance, so I think now's the time." "If not now, when?" Kel said reasonably. "Indeed. And I think coupling it with pickled herring and maybe some other kind of fish to make a trio will create something amazing. Maybe something fried, since the other two parts of the dish won't have any crunch. Or I could just do, like, a potato chip? I do love potatoes." I made another note. "And for the third dish, I'm thinking duck. I want to do cracklings with the duck skin and then a play on borscht, which is what the dish is really about. Beets on the plate, pickled onions, an oniony sauce, et cetera." "Ducks and beets play well together," Kel said, approval warm on their round face.

I do not think I have seen anyone so beautiful; I was enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so masked, so ingenuous and so penetrating. But one felt a terrible unreality about her — as if talking to someone under water. Bobby and I engaged in mock competition for her; she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me, but one never felt her to be wholly engaged. She receded into her own glittering mist.

Stevie remembers seeing Janis Joplin (when a band she and Lindsey were a part of in San Francisco several years ago opened Joplin’s show). “I walked away from that show saying, ‘Okay, Stevie, there’s your competition. If you ever, ever do anything good, then you’re going to have to try and at least capture the feeling that she gave out.’ I could never be like Janis and I wouldn’t want to be like her. She was her own, unique self, but I do want to capture the charisma she had. And I think maybe I’ve touched the surface of it and I will continue—that is the goal. I want to make films on record. If I say ‘I wish you were mine/I’ll give you up even though I’ll never hold you again’ I want people to go ‘Oh yeah, I know how that feels.’ That’s really all I want to leave behind. A little bit of a good memory in people’s heads so they don’t just write it off as something that went by.

The most striking phenomenon connected with the progress of technology is the development of cultural centres into large cities in the modern sense; these form the soil in which the new art is rooted. Impressionism is an urban art, and not only because it discovers the landscape quality of the city and brings painting back from the country into the town, but because it sees the world through the eyes of the townsman and reacts to external impressions with the overstrained nerves of modern technical man. It is an urban style, because it describes the changeability, the nervous rhythm, the sudden, sharp but always ephemeral impressions of city life. And precisely as such, it implies an enormous expansion of sensual perception, a new sharpening of sensibility, a new irritability, and, with the Gothic and romanticism, it signifies one of the most important turning points in the history of Western art. In the dialectical process represented by the history of painting, the alternation of the static and the dynamic, of design and colour, abstract order and organic life, impressionism forms the climax of the development in which recognition is given to the dynamic and organic elements of experience and which completely dissolves the static world-view of the Middle Ages. A continuous line can be traced from the Gothic to impressionism comparable to the line leading from late medieval economy to high capitalism, and modern man, who regards his whole existence as a struggle and a competition, who translates all being into motion and change, for whom experience of the world increasingly becomes experience of time, is the product of this bilateral, but fundamentally uniform development.

The initial guiding principle was simple: “Buy the rights to a fine play, hire the biggest names available, and hope the public will listen.” But competition for big names was fierce in New York. When film stars came east—usually on a train between movies, en route to Europe—they were mobbed by agents seeking their appearances on the big variety shows. An appearance on The Rudy Vallee Hour or Shell Chateau paid more and was less demanding—a bit of fluff between musical selections, which an actor could learn in a single rehearsal. The demand for top stars was so desperate that Lux scouts created devious ways of snaring them. One “bright young fellow,” as described by Radio Guide, simply grabbed up Leslie Howard’s suitcases and led him through a gauntlet of competing agents to a waiting cab. Only when they were settled in the car did it occur to Howard to ask who he was. “I’m from The Lux Radio Theater, and you’re going to act for us tomorrow night,” said the brash young fellow. He had caught (and subsequently booked) a hot young star by knowing that “a man will always follow his suitcases.

Bill and Virginia both said that their association with the lions during the filming of Born Free had had an enormous influence on their lives, and we frequently discussed with them the whole question of the conservation and protection of wild animals. We realized for the first time how drastically short-sighted man has been. Many of these issues have since become even more urgent, with the competition between man and wildlife for habitats and resources, including water, the degradation of the environment, and the ramifications of global warming. What has become even more obvious to us in the interrelationships between man and the natural environment, and how holistic any solutions will have to be.

The studios then fed their pictures first and exclusively to theaters they owned in competitive markets like New York, Chicago, and Boston. A caste system among theaters developed in which first-run pictures went to certain chains and second-run pictures—reruns, essentially—went to another tier of chains. In dealing with independent theater owners, distributors used the leverage of stars and major pictures to bundle their slate of minor pictures—for a theater owner to get the big blockbusters, he had to agree to show the harder-to-market films. The studio system’s purpose at every step was to smooth out the economics of an unpredictable business. The outcome was a functioning cartel.

Sound of Freedom When I read the plot of Sound of Freedom, I was wondering what’s so new or special about the film that it has reviewed by many as best Hollywood film of 2023. This year has been a highly competitive year when it comes to sequels of some great successes in Hollywood, and I was surprised how this film based on child trafficking has managed to top score charts. After freeing the boy, the federal agent discovers that the child’s sister continues to be in possession of the people who trafficked children and then embarks on a risky mission to liberate her. This appears to be a fairly standard setup for a story of this kind. When he realised that she was going to die soon, he quit his job and went far into the Colombian jungle, putting everything on the line in an attempt to save her life. I was sure I have seen many similar plots before, but after watching the film, I must say it exceeded the expectations and conveyed some messages that world needs to be remined off again and again. Here are the few reasons why it’s a must watch. Visit my website: Filmworld.online

Sound of Freedom When I read the plot of Sound of Freedom, I was wondering what’s so new or special about the film that it has reviewed by many as best Hollywood film of 2023. This year has been a highly competitive year when it comes to sequels of some great successes in Hollywood, and I was surprised how this film based on child trafficking has managed to top score charts.

One night we were sitting in the great room at Hurtwood when he said, “Well, I suppose I’d better divorce her,” to which I replied, “Well, if you divorce her, then that means I’ve got to marry her!” It was like a scene from a Woody Allen film. Over the years, our relationship developed into a sort of cagey brotherliness, with him, of course, being the elder brother. There was no doubt that we loved one another, but when we actually got together it could get quite competitive and tense, and I very rarely got the last word.

Also intriguing was all the bowing. The association of height and status did not, of course, faze him. If anything, it made the Japanese seem noble. But where were the ones who made themselves big? That was the question. With so many people bowing down, it seemed to Majnoun like a competition amongst the low to see who could be lowest. In which case, discretion was strength, a paradox that Majnoun found almost as compelling as the film's relative absence of dogs.

According to Kim, 1998 was the turning point for Korean films entering the international arena. “In the fifty years up to 1997,” said Kim, “only four Korean films were screened at the Cannes Film Festival,” and even those were screened out of competition. “But in 1998, four Korean films were invited to Cannes.” What

I don’t want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the cross-bow. It isn’t true. There is something new in the world. And I don’t want to hear, when I’ve had an encounter with some mogul in the film industry, who wields the kind of power over men’s minds that no emperor ever did, and I come back feeling trampled on all over, that Lesbia felt like that after an encounter with her wine-merchant. And I don’t want to be told when I suddenly have a vision (though God knows it’s hard enough to come by) of a life that isn’t full of hatred and fear and envy and competition every minute of the night and the day that this is simply the old dream of the golden age brought up to date …

I am Sebastiano, and your name?” he asks. “Violet,” I say as we step over the threshold. “Violetta!” he says, throwing his arms wide. “English girl, Italian name!” And across the room, I see a dark head turn in our direction. That much taller than the rest of the boys, he stands out, his straight black silky hair falling over his face, his blue eyes as bright and cold as the water of the fjord next to my grandmother’s summer rental cottage. I was looking for him before and couldn’t see him anywhere; now that I’ve been distracted by dancing and a Chianti-drinking donkey, he’s spotted me. His gaze flicks like a knife between me and the boy, who’s at the gigantic wine bottle now, filling cups and handing me one. “Salute!” Sebastiano says, touching his cup to mine, and I glance up at Luca, seeing that he’s taking this in, too. A rush of confusion fills me as I toast. I’m glad that Luca’s seen me with someone else, that I haven’t been a wallflower at this party, that I’ve proved him wrong, even a little bit, because there’s a boy here who seems to like me, who’s talking to me, anyway, getting me a drink. In films, in books, flirting with a boy is a surefire way to get the one you actually like interested in you, draw him over to your side. They’re supposed to like competition, the challenge of going after a girl who’s popular. But maybe real life doesn’t quite work that way. Because Luca arches one black eyebrow, his mouth quirks up on one side in a sneer, and he turns pointedly away sliding a cigarette into his mouth, and lighting it with a flip of his Zippo. Disgusting habit, I think as firmly as I can. I’m glad he’s not coming over, smoking a nasty stinking cancer stick. It’s awful when you lie to yourself. I do think smoking is foul, but I’m also more than aware that if Luca strolled over to talk to me, with that cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, I wouldn’t walk away, complaining about the smoke; I’d stand there staring up at him, trying not to grin as widely as a five-year-old meeting Cinderella at Disneyland.

For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America. The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years. Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised. “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.” But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity. And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.