Monday, June 21, 2010

Favourite Court Room/Trial Films

Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Dreyer, 1928)
Witness for the Prosecution (Billy Wilder, 1957)
The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman, 1943)
Twelve Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957)
Inherit the Wind (Stanley Kramer, 1960)
Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1958)
The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1957)
Young Mr Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)
Fury (Fritz Lang, 1936)

Sunday, June 20, 2010

"The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given, Philosophy, though ubable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect."

- Bertrand Russell

Monday, June 7, 2010

Just finished reading the book. The film is much better in my opinion. For one thing, the character of Keyes and his relationship with Walter is much more developed and complex in the film version. The scene where Keyes rambles on about suicide statistics is lifted as it is from the book though.
Quietly scribbling away in some dark corner of internet : recording the banal and boring and meaningless act of resistance, that is, living this life.