FROM HELL a Film by The Hughes Bros.

A Scotland yard Detective is on the case of the notorious Jack the Ripper. Few names in history are as instantly recognizable. Fewer still evoke such vivid images: noisome courts and alleys, hansom cabs and gaslights, swirling fog, prostitutes decked out in the tawdriest of finery, the shrill cry of newsboys - and silent, cruel death personified in the cape-shrouded figure of a faceless prowler of the night, armed with a long knife and carrying a black Gladstone bag. (Philip Sugden, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper) The classic whodunit, Jack the Ripper stalked the dark London streets in 1888, killing prostitutes in increasing brutality and surgical precision before suddenly disappearing into the mists from which he came. His identity was never revealed. Hundreds, if not thousands of theories exist as to whom the Ripper was, a surgeon, possibly connected to the crown, but nothing has ever been proven. Even with 20th Century technology, we have been unable to solve the mystery of who Jack The Ripper was.

Horror movies are not my forte, and I was worried that this movie was going to indulge in the bloody nature of the subject. Other reviews I have read indicated that there was a large amount of gore in this film, but they couldn’t have been further from the truth. A few moments of the film made me wince and turn my head, however they have stayed true to the subject, without turning to gore. If you have ever read about Jack the Ripper, you will have seen photos of his victims, and other than the lobotomy you see performed, that’s about as gory as it got. 

I was incredibly impressed with the camera work and set work for this piece. Not only were the sets authentic, it was dirty- just like London really would have been in the 1880’s. The dresses and makeup for the prostitutes were also wonderful-rotten teeth, filthy nails. Unlike most Hollywood films, you don’t see a flash on white teeth, or manicures or anything else that’s not period. The only disappointing fact (in fact the only disappointing fact of the whole movie) is that Heather Graham was entirely too clean. 

As for the end of the movie, I will not spoil it for you. The writers have not only stayed true to the historic base of the subject, they have also explained why the murders were never solved. An intriguing end and one I never saw coming.

THE PIANIST a Film by Roman Polanski

I dreaded having to see this movie.  Oh, how I didn’t want to see this movie.  You don’t know how burned out I am with World War II era war/Holocaust movies.  In addition, this movie is almost two and a half hours long.  I almost considered just skipping it, but a couple of things made me go.  First, it won the Golden Palm, the top award at the Cannes Film Festival.  Second, the legendary Roman Polanski directed it.   

The Pianist starts out in Warsaw in 1939.  Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is a gifted pianist who specialized in played Chopin pieces, which he did over Polish radio.  He played the last live music heard over Polish radio airwaves before Nazi artillery hit.  He and his family, including his father (Frank Finlay), his mother (Maureen Lipman), his older brother Henryk (Ed Stoppard), and his two sisters Regina (Julia Raynor) and Halina (Jessica Kate Meyer), are all captured and sent to the Warsaw ghetto.  The Nazis then decide to exterminate some of the Jews in the ghetto, so they begin deporting them to the concentration camps.  As he and his family are being loaded up on the trains to be shipped away to the camps, a former friend named Itzak Heller (Roy Smiles), now a Nazi collaborator working as an auxiliary police officer, saves him by pulling him out of the line.  He spends the next couple of years moving from hideout to hideout, helped by Jewish sympathizers, including a cellist he had met earlier named Dorota (Emilia Fox), and a singer named Janina (Ruth Platt) with her husband Bogucki (Ronan Vibert.)  He might have had a romance with Dorota, but the war got in the way.  After he can’t make it to any more safe houses, he spends the last part of the war in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.  It is there he is confronted by a music-loving Nazi soldier named Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann), who helps Szpilman ride out the rest of the war after an impromptu performance given by the pianist. 

Why wasn’t this movie as boring as I thought it was going to be?  It’s mainly because they gave the main character some hope without getting sentimental.  Throughout his hiding, he witnesses some horrible things being done to his fellow Jews, but he manages to survive.  In fact, it seems he is in the safest place for most of the movie during all the carnage.  Brody plays Szpilman perfectly, making him look shocked at first to the things that were going around him, then desensitized.  He also pulls a Tom Hanks from Cast Away and gets more skeletal as the movie goes on.

In addition, like Cast Away, this is pretty much a one man show, which is one of its problems.  It’s not that I expected a lot of dialogue in a movie that is about a single man surviving the war (something I heard people complaining about Cast Away…the lack of dialogue, that is), but I wanted to see more development of some of the supporting characters.  I will say that the movie does basically start once he is separated from his family.  Speaking of his family…that brings up another problem.  I know it is an American critic trait to want closure, but I didn’t understand why the notes at the end say what happened to Szpilman, and even what the fate of Captain Hosenfeld, but what about his family and friends?  That kind of irked me.

The Pianist is definitely not for everyone.  I don’t think young kids should see it, because it is coldly brutal with its violence (I think some old people walked out of the screening after seeing some of it.)  Also, if you are tired of Holocaust movies, after seeing about a zillion of them since Schindler’s List, this movie explores little new ground.  If you want to see an uncensored, unapologetic movie about the reality of the Holocaust and how one man’s survival of it, then by all means, check it out.  It’s not one of my favorite movies of the year, but it is far from boring.

 

The Jews and their Deceits by Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler, a well known dictator has spoken. This article is about Hitler's perspectives and exposures of the truth about the Jews. In this article, we can see that Hitler has revealed many truth about the Jews, their evil plans, their lying about things and willing to take over the world. For me myself, i'm a fan of this so called "bad boy" dictator. I love the way he written the truth about Jews, he have told the world what are the main agendas that the Jews has planned for so long times. Yes, I admitted that he was really brutal by given the orders to killed all that Jews societies without any humanity feeling towards them, that I admit is wrong, but what I'm trying to say here, beside of that dark events, wars, I can clearly what are the reasons Hitler did all that.

Jews can define themselves as they wish. If they feel themselves to be a nation, then they are a nation. But, in accordance with the dictum, that 'your freedom to swing your arm ends where your finger touches my nose', it is when this self-definition impinges on others that the problems begin. It is then that others may ask whether this Jewish sense of nationhood-often an emotional and religious matter based on a perceived sharing of history and even of destiny-can ever be realized politically. What it boils down to is this: Jews, like any other people, may have the right to establish and maintain a state of their own, but for example nowadays, do Jews have the right to establish and maintain a state of their own in Palestine? What i'm trying to say here is, we all now know the truth about Jews themselves, even though they hardly try to keep all their evil works underground, keeping as secrets as Hitler's stated that the Jews never tells the truth. - Suko Laynon.

"If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed." - Adolf Hitler

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The Degree Of Happiness By Bertrand Russell

  

Bertrand Russell wrote a very interesting article titled 'The Degree Of Happiness'. What I am able to understand as I read it was to show the two type of happiness. According to the article, there are two types of happiness is to put it on one type which is open to any human being and the other one as for only those who can read or write. The happiness that from the one that any human being are open to doesn't have a need to depend upon intellectual sources, nor does it need to be based upon natural law of beliefs or even any of the fads, fashion and creeds that those who are intellectual needs to be happy.

That is one type of happiness that are open to any human being while the another type applied for those who are considered to be intellectual. For this kind of people, according to the author, during his time the scientist or science people were the happiest. It was because most of the science people were emotionally simple and easily satisfied out of their work making them derive easily pleasure from eating or even marrying. This somehow is proven to be the other way around for artiste as they are complex in emotion. That is all of what I am able to understand from this interesting article.

Critical Literacy

Critical Literacy is an instructional approach, stemming from Marxist Critical pedagogy, that advocates the adoption of "critical" perspectives toward text. Critical literacy encourages readers to actively analyze texts and offers strategies for what proponents describe as uncovering underlying messages. There are several different theoretical perspectives on critical literacy that have produced different pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning. All of these approaches share the basic premise that literacy requires the literate consumers of text to adopt a critical and questioning approach.

According to proponents of critical literacy, the practice is not simply a means of attaining literacy in the sense of improving the ability to decode words, syntax, etc. In fact, the ability to read words on paper is not necessarily required in order to engage in a critical discussion of "texts," which can include television, movies, web pages, music, art and other means of expression. The important thing is being able to have a discussion with others about the different meanings a text might have and teaching the potentially critically literate learner how to think flexibly about it.