The Last Movie You Saw On DVD or VHS or TV.

Thanks, Germlat, for your post. I wish you well in your viewing and reading life.-Ron

Thanks Ron, great input. You seem to have a good grasp on film.

'The Awakening' was on Brit TV recently-
"A ghost-debunker comes to a boy's school to disprove the existence of ghosts... Florence sets to work immediately, laying traps, gathering scientific evidence.."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfilms/film/the_awakening

I found it sensible and okay for the first hour or so, but then it lapsed into a bit of a confusing mishmash-

I find it strange that the ending of a film or book is the most difficult to pull off...don't you?!

I think it has to do with writing your vision or making it up on the fly.

Richard Burton's Hamlet

Someone, somewhere said they found this filmed version of the play fusty, slow-moving and old-fashioned. After watching Branagh's four hour Hamlet festival three times, and having seen this film as a seventeen-year-old high school senior, I like this film. I see how Burton saw the character as opposed to how Branagh saw it. Burton saw the humor in the play but Branagh saw the heroics.

I always like Hume Cronyn and I appreciate his presence here. His Polonius is quit apart from either the doddering old man played through most of the 20th C. or the more recent masculine Polonius depictions of Bill Murray and Richard Briers.

I know story lines are not necessarily written in a linear fashion and many conceptualize the end as a starting point in the process. I've read so many well developed stories and at the end seem to not be able to tie it all in together. I enjoy surprise endings. The movie the sixth sense comes to mind.

At school our english teacher told us- "A story should have a good beginning, a good middle, and a good ending", but many authors/writers nowadays are in the habit of leaving their readers hanging in midair puzzled, maybe they can't think up a good ending ha ha..

I think the conclusion is the most difficult.

I've seen a lot of movies, but the Sixth Sense had me dangling till the end. Great Movie!!!! 4 wows

I wrote the following after watching The Sixth Sense.-Ron
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Part 1:

In the kingdom of fiction, novels, stories and science fiction, the constraints of historical knowledge have been suspended or considerably loosened and played with. There is a great freedom to explore imaginative variations of history, of the past in these literary forms. In autobiography I do not enjoy this luxury but, still, reconstructing the past needs the help of imagination.

Just as fiction has a quasi-historical component, so too does autobiography have a quasi-fictional component. History and fiction intersect in autobiography in the reconfiguration of time, in that fragile mix where the facts of the past and human imagination join in an effort to produce the deepest observations and the liveliest images, to enlarge the narrow circle of experience and to penetrate the complexities of life.

Anthony Giddens, one of the U.K.s greatest sociologists, wrote that a person's identity is "not to be found in behaviour, nor in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going." That person must continually re-enact and, in the process, integrate events and sort them into an ongoing story about the self. He must, and in this case the self is a 'he', "have a notion of how he has become who he is and where he is going." There is a process of selecting and of discarding memories, a partly robust and partly fragile set of feelings and self-identity. And that is what I do here.

Anthony Giddens(1938- ) is a British sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists, the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year. In 2007, Giddens was listed as the fifth most-referenced author of books in the humanities. "More than ever before," wrote Giddens, "we have access to information that allows us to reflect on the causes and consequences of our actions. At the same time we are faced with dangers related to unintended consequences of our actions and by our reliance on the knowledge of experts."

Part 2:

Giddens has much to say, many useful perspectives for the autobiographer like myself. "We create, maintain and revise a set of biographical narratives, social roles and lifestyles," he writes, "the story of who we are, and how we came to be where we are now. We are increasingly free to choose what we want to do and who we want to be, although Giddens contends that wealth gives access to more options. But increased choice can be both liberating and troubling. Liberating in the sense of increasing the likelihood of one's self-fulfilment, and troubling in form of increased emotional stress and time needed to analyse the available choices and minimise risk of which we are increasingly aware. As Giddens says in his Modernity and Self-Identity: "What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late modernity — and ones which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behaviour."

Part 3:

Perhaps Sir Francis Drake put it more strikingly and eloquently in his prayer:
O Lord God!
When Thou givest to Thy servants
to endeavour any great matter,
Grant us to know that it is
not the beginning
But the continuing of the same
to the end,
Until it be thoroughly finished,
Which yieldeth the true glory…..

Autobiography is interpretive self-history, re-enactment in a very real and full sense, and an interpretive self-history that goes on until one’s last breaths. It is a dialogue with time and I have spent various periods of the last thirty years(1984-2013) trying to give my experience a cast, a shape, and make a coherent intervention into my past not just write a chronicle of elapsed events. As I do this I find I nourish the past, anticipate the future and face unavoidable existential realities like death, my own limitations and failures. While my account is ostensibly about myself, I like to think that it becomes, in the end, about the reader. For there is a complex symbiosis here between me and you and the many readers not yet born. "I'll live in this poor rime," as Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 107. Every writer worth his salt likes to think, hopes, as the Bard wrote in the last couplet of this sonnet, that

………thou in this shalt find thy monument
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.

It is difficult to present an orderly account of one's story. Frankly, though, I don’t think orderliness is crucial. As the American novelist Henry James once wrote, back in 1888, the crucial thing is to be saturated with life and in the case of this autobiography: my life, my times and my vales, beliefs and attitudes.

Henry James(1843-1916) was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. Time has a corrosive quality and produces a certain vacancy of memory, as well as an enriching quality that produces delights for the imagination and intellect.

Part 4:

Space and time are, as de Quincey once wrote, a mystery. Thomas Penson De Quincey(1785-1859) was an English essayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). Space and time grow on man as man grows and they are “a function of the godlike which is in man.” So what I tell here is some of this mystery. I am conscious of what the writer and philosopher Mencken wrote about autobiography, namely, that no man can “bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and as a believer, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends or even to his wife.” She, like servants of old, though, are most likely to see the true colours of a man or a woman. Honest autobiography, Mencken wrote, is a contradiction in terms. All writers try to guild and fresco themselves.

Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken(1880-1956) was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, critic of American life and culture, and scholar of American English. He was known as the "Sage of Baltimore"; he is and was regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century. Many of his books remain in print. There may be some guilding here in my autobiography, but I think I make an improvement on most biographies which A.J. P. Taylor said were mostly guesswork. There is a tone of tentative enquiry in this work; there is inevitably some guesswork; there is a recognition that truth is often elusive and subtle.

Part 5:

I have taken, too, Taylor's advice on politics. Taylor wrote that "the only sane course is never, never, to have any opinions about the Middle East." If anything, I point toward a way; I urge and encourage, but I do not offer answers to complex political questions by taking sides, criticizing governments or taking positions on various crises and issues. Alan John Percivale Taylor(1906-1990) was a British historian who specialised in 19th and 20th century European diplomacy. Both a journalist and a broadcaster, he became well known to millions through his television lectures. His combination of academic rigour and popular appeal led historian Richard Overy to describe him as "the Macaulay of our age."

I have taken a page out of Taylor's historical perspective. If anything, my book is a timely, anecdotal and impressionistic examination of the historical origins of the Baha'i alternative in my time, an alternative embedded in my life and my four epochs. Life's sense and nonsense have pierced me with a feeling, a view, that much of existence is strange and absurd; there is much that is vain and empty in what passes through our sensory emporiums. History for millions is more nightmare and panorama of futility and anarchy. So many millions of human beings seem ill-equipped to deal with the forces of modernity. The resulting social commotion, the resulting disarray is evident all around us.

As my own days pass swifter than the twinkling of an eye, I offer here in this autobiography something of my experience with the relentless acceleration of forces in the dynamic span of epochs that have been the background of my life. I offer, too, layers of memories that have coalesced, that have condensed, into a single substance, a single rock, the rock of my life. But this rock of my life possesses streaks of colour which point to differences in origin, in age and formation. It helps to be a geologist to interpret their meaning and I, like most people, have no advanced training or study in geology. So it is that my memories have fused together and they are not fully understood. Perhaps by my latter, my later, years; perhaps in an afterlife, in that Undiscovered Country when I enter the land of lights, then, I will understand.

I could begin, for example, with my first memory of making a mud-pie in the spring; perhaps the snow was still on the ground or the April rains had come after a Canadian winter. Perhaps it was March or perhaps it was April of 1948 as the Canadian Baha'i community was just completing the first fifty years of its history. Perhaps it was on that weekend of the 24th and 25th of April 1948 when the first National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Canada was elected by 112 Baha'is in Montreal. That's when I'd like to think my first memory occurred in real time. But, alas, I do not have a unified, factually accurate, version of that first event in my mind's eye. I am saddled, as we all are, with a host of variations of what happens to us, what is around us and what it all means...if I wanted I could make the whole thing an adventure in science fiction.-Ron Price, Australia.

WOW!!!!! I didn't know Sir Francis Drake reviewed the Sixth Sense, you learn something new everyday.

The Sixth Sense is a 1999 American supernatural thriller film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. The film tells the story of Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), a troubled, isolated boy who is able to see and talk to the dead, and an equally troubled child psychologist (Bruce Willis) who tries to help him. The film established Shyamalan as a writer and director, and introduced the cinema public to his traits, most notably his affinity for surprise endings. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. I found this film quite moving and I confess to being a bit of a Bruce Willis fan.-Ron

You are truly a very deep and interesting person. I must read about you.

Like most of us, you probably recorded some of your favorite memories onto a VHS tape. Preserve the good times by transferring the tape to a DVD.See

Watched The Family an uproarious romp of a dysfunctional mob family transferred to France by the US witness protection program.
A body count that, led by the efforts of family patriarch, Robert deNiro, keeps rising throughout the movie to its gore-a-thonic denoument (but to which , the French police appear oblivious).
A laugh-a-minute movie that celebrates the dysfunctional and antisocial family values as a benefit when travelling abroad.
Its no wonder we are so loved by our allies

I give it two opposable thumbs down.

youre about 15 years too late with that technology. We stream movies now

Technology changes but content does not.

Absurd and untrue.

Please explain . I'm sure those two don't necessarily go hand in hand. Not saying they don't ever as a possibility ...I'm speaking about streaming over recording on VHS...the context of the message doesn't change. You want to make it about something else go ahead...