Brown Motion

What if such a concept was available now accurate to the minute?  Even those in the esteemed Silicon Valley seem unable to crack this one. Not so for a Belgian filmmaker who directed 'The Brand New Testament'.  Originally released in French this film is a dark comedy about something most humanity holds sacred and frankly is unable to or unwilling to discuss.  Death. The basic plot revolves around a family in Brussels, the father is God who along with his timid wife and a 12 year old daughter, Ea, live in an apartment.  God pretty much runs the show and does not allow anyone in his family to have a say in anything and neither is anyone allowed outside their apartment. One day the bold and insanely curious Ea escapes through a wormhole inside the washing machine in the apartment and goes in search of discovering the unknown.  Not before she breaks into God's computer and broadcasts the date of death to all living people on the planet. Conceptually audac...

We watched 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' over the long Memorial Holiday weekend in the US.  Then we bookended the weekend with an old spy film called 'The Good Shepherd' directed by Robert De Niro. This weekend we remember the soldiers that lost lives over the many wars America fought.   Rightly it is about honoring the unquestionable courage and sacrifice that men and women provided in serving their country.  Another blog might perhaps cover the nuances of whether all wars were worth fighting, but as Dr. Fredericks in 'The Good Shepherd' tells Wilson (Matt Damon), "we are all bootmakers to the kings". Another quote from De Niro's character says, "After all is said and done we are all clerks too".  All these embedded lines in movies sometimes highlight the real world a lot of us live in where we do not get a chance to explore the unknown or speak freely of our ideas, however democratic our institutions might appear to be - marriag...