1. I'm sixty-nine years old. I've been watching movies fairly seriously for about forty-five years. It's as astounding to me to think about the number of eminent movies I've never seen as ones I have viewed. One such movie is Akira Kurosawa's 1950 masterpiece, Rashomon. I watched it today.
In it, Kurosawa focuses on a single story about a bandit raping a woman in the woods and the death of the woman's husband. The movie tells the same story four times so that we see this assault take place through the perception of the bandit, the woman, the dead man (told through a medium), and a woodcutter who observed what happened.
Each character's telling of the story is vastly different than the other three accounts, although all of the storytellers agree that the rape occurred and that the woman's husband is dead.
The movie opens with a priest and the woodcutter in conversation and we hear one line repeated several times: "I don't understand."
This movie is interpreted in many different ways, but everyone agrees that at its core, it's an exploration of the subjective nature of our perceptions of what happens and that understanding and knowing the truth are, at best, unreliable. More often than not, we don't understand.
2. I can say with reliable certainty that Ed and I booked it up to Kellogg High School's Andrews Gymnasium and watched the hometown girls squad host the Grangeville Bulldogs. The Wildcats lost tonight's tilt, 54-37. Grangeville won this game with full court pressure defense, excellent ball movement and some solid shooting, and with better players. I thought the Wildcats played hard, with determination, but they had trouble scoring. Tonight, at least, the Wildcats didn't seem to have one or two reliable players they could go to for baskets. Grangeville had at least two or three "go to" players and the contrast became more pronounced as the game progressed.
I enjoyed the game, even though it was lopsided. I enjoyed that both teams' players exerted a lot of energy and Grangevilled had at least two players who I thought were very talented and fun to watch.
I also enjoyed being back at the gym where I used to humiliate myself with consistently mediocre performances when I was a Wildcat. I love how much more colorful, comfortable, and shiny the facility is now and I didn't have any painful flashbacks to my failures in this gym. I was locked in to what was happening in the present, thank goodness.
3. I returned home and Perry Mason was waist deep in a case in a small Nevada town, working to clear the name of a young man whose father had been guilty of robbery and murder in this same place. Everything seemed to point to the young man as the one who committed murder, who seemed to have followed in his father's footsteps, but with some cagey investigation and the awesome assistance of Paul Drake and Della Street, Perry Mason got to the bottom of the murder case and extracted a confession out of the actual killer.
We ended our evening of television viewing in the world of cosmetics and watched Columbo through a lot of head scratching and moments of staring into the far reaches of the universe, nail the person responsible for the death of a chemist. For me, it was particularly fun that Vincent Price played a supporting role in this episode and, as he is so talented at doing, played the mendacity and campiness of his character to perfection.
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