http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/ Looking for Ideas and Insight in Popular Media en-us 2009-07-15T12:13:21-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/185829.html The British series Coupling is smart and competent and sophisticated and all about sex. Its cleverness just oozes out: every complex film-making, scene-arranging trick you can imagine is exploited for fun: multiple perspectives, an edited timeline, counting down to a... shea0017 2009-07-15T12:13:21-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/160860.html There are a lot of shows almost exactly like this one, movies and series, except for the title. Sex in the City is this over and over again, except for the title. The tumultuous falling in love is the same.... shea0017 2008-12-29T22:35:02-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/160773.html I am voting for these, for 2008, all from Youtube: 1. Warren Buffett did a talk to an MBA class a while back. The whole thing is up on Youtube in 10 minute segments. Segment 1, about his general approach... shea0017 2008-12-27T11:47:50-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/160656.html Wives switch families for two weeks. Usually the families are very different, distinguished by different senses of responsibility, different needs for control, different levels of acceptance of the conventional American obsessions. Occasionally, somebody seems to be mentally ill. This is... shea0017 2008-12-23T11:31:35-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/160485.html “First Class All the Way,� a Bravo reality show about a high-end ‘concierge’ travel service for the most affluent and demanding clients, does very good work. It shows what unlimited money buys: something like perfect service, the (nearly) perfect adaptation... shea0017 2008-12-21T09:55:42-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/160375.html Yesterday, I saw an old, probably rightly forgotten movie called Nothing But the Night, which is similar in plot to the better (original) Wicker Man, a horror movie that, for me, defines horror. Some of the writing about Nothing But... shea0017 2008-12-19T12:19:23-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/084558.html Star Trek over its long history has done some fine work to help people think about being human by providing plausible contrast cases: characters who are half-human or not quite human. One persistent topic: the question about how central having... shea0017 2007-08-04T11:34:10-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/070065.html A cowboy show in space. It has been tried before. This one lasted one season. It has become our family bonding experience, thanks to a Borders Valentines Day sale on the boxed set. A thrown-together "family" of outlaws with principles,... shea0017 2007-02-26T08:45:04-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/065010.html Socrates begins his defense of his life in Athens with a survey of the prejudices against him, which, he says, dispose the jurors to believe the prosecutors’ charges. We all know that he is talking about something real: beliefs prepare... shea0017 2007-01-24T10:25:03-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/049113.html Those who go down to the sea in ships, who do business in great waters; 24 These see Yahweh's works, and his wonders in the deep. 25 For he commands, and raises the stormy wind, which lifts up its waves.... shea0017 2006-07-19T10:29:04-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/048103.html Superman was a sort of miracle, because of what happened to Christopher Reeve later on: his paralysis, and his dogged fight to regain some small mobility. Everything about the human condition, about visions of heroism, about what fades and what... shea0017 2006-06-29T07:53:21-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/047904.html We orient ourselves by our immediate environment: a house, the computer desktop, the interior of a car. What we can think and feel, how we spontaneously respond, is largely determined by that environment. In that connection, the channel line-up for... shea0017 2006-06-23T11:27:46-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/047793.html PBS ran a piece last night about "On the Method," a work by the mathematician Archimedes discovered on parchment that had been reused as a medieval prayerbook. New technology allows people to read the underlying text and discover how close... shea0017 2006-06-21T13:35:25-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/046098.html This is a movie about a detective brought back from exile in the fire department to solve a perplexing series of murders. He is very smart and means well, and those around him mostly are not smart and do not... shea0017 2006-05-14T01:15:52-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/shea0017/philmoviestv/045787.html I just read of legislative proposals to redo tv signals to make commercials obligatory - inserting special commands to disable fast forward. For a fee, one could have fast forward back. I took that in, together with information about the... shea0017 2006-05-10T10:35:23-06:00