{"id":8016,"date":"2009-01-23T16:12:46","date_gmt":"2009-01-24T00:12:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=8016"},"modified":"2009-01-23T23:02:15","modified_gmt":"2009-01-24T07:02:15","slug":"did-the-pianist-have-a-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=8016","title":{"rendered":"Did &#8216;The Pianist&#8217; Have A Point?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I saw this movie with a gorgeous shiksa in a dark and empty theater and one thing led to another and we were groping each other in the dark like there was no tomorrow.<\/p>\n<p>Pictures of the Holocaust do that to me.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t waste my time while I was groping her however. I kept my eyes on the screen and I saw the whole thing.<\/p>\n<p>And at the end, I wondered, what was the point? The protagonist does not change. What kind of story is it when the protagonist does not change? This does not feel like a story to me.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, this feels deeply real and moving to me and I can&#8217;t wait to go home.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/opinion\/commentary\/la-oe-gumbel23-2009jan23,0,7165409.story\">Andrew Gumbel writes in today&#8217;s LAT<\/a>: &quot;I&#8217;d seen &quot;The Pianist,&quot; Roman Polanski&#8217;s stunning, highly personalized story of survival in World War II Poland, and became convinced that granting top honors to any other film would be a travesty &#8212; especially at a time when the United States had just invaded Iraq and the horrors of war were on everyone&#8217;s minds.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>I emailed my problem with &quot;The Pianist&quot; to Andrew and he replied: &quot;For me, all the external events, and the images of them produced for the film, did the job of mapping the character&#8217;s internal development. In the same sort of way that Antonioni or Wim Wenders movies sometimes do. But I can see why that might not work for some people&#8230;&quot;<\/p>\n<p>I was deeply changed by the movie because I had taken my relationship with my girlfriend to the next level &#8212; public sex.<\/p>\n<p>Nothing says I&#8217;ll love you forever like the act of love during a Holocaust movie.<\/p>\n<p>On the third hour of his radio show Friday (before taking a ten day vacation to Kenya), Dennis Prager said that his friend Rabbi Shmuley Boteach &quot;romanticizes women&#8230; I have a dim view of both sexes. I don&#8217;t know what the statement means &#8212; women are more sexual than men. Can women experience more orgasms? Yes. It&#8217;s an odd measurement of the word sexual. Are women as preoccupied by sex as men? No. Men have sexual thoughts more frequently than women do and are aroused more easily.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Caller: &quot;How did your musical tastes extend beyond classical?&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Dennis: &quot;I developed a love of non-classical music as an adult&#8230; About ten years ago, my older son and I took this trip together. He said, &#8216;Dad, I have this soundtrack. You want to listen?&#8217; I listen to whatever my kids want me to listen to, including music I hate. He put it on and I loved it. It was a wake-up call that there was other beautiful music out there. For ten years, I&#8217;ve immersed myself in jazz and in soundtracks.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I was so alienated by my generation&#8217;s culture and values in the late &#8217;60s and early &#8217;70s, I almost excluded the baby with the bathwater. I&#8217;m sure there was beautiful music done at the time. I found a lot of it self-preoccupied, with people chanting their woes with their guitar. I&#8217;m not saying this is accurate. I&#8217;m just saying this is how I tuned out of that culture. I was so satisfied with classical, it spoke to every emotion I had in a deep way&#8230; I admit to being an oddball. I missed out on a lot of wonderful music.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>A caller asks Dennis how he found time in his hectic schedule to find a wife.<\/p>\n<p>Dennis: &quot;If you have to date a lot, that takes up a lot of time. If you are lucky enough to meet somebody and not have to date a lot, the time factor is not a big factor. That played a role in my life.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>California Attorney General Jerry Brown calls Proposition 8 &quot;oppression by the majority.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Dennis: &quot;Every law passed by a majority can be called &#8216;oppression by the majority.&#8217; You might as well say that taxes are oppression by the majority. You have people who don&#8217;t pay taxes voting on how much people who do pay taxes should pay.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Since Jerry Brown is higher than the law of the state since he has a more refined morality, he knows he is a better man, therefore he can say screw you to the people of California. He just knows he&#8217;s right. How does he know? Because he feels it.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Every law passed has an oppressive feature. That&#8217;s what a law is. And anybody who disagrees with it is oppressed almost by definition.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I stare out [when listening to a caller or guest]. To concentrate fully, if I look at anything else I am distracted, I prefer to interview my guests by phone. That way I am not even distracted by having to look at them. That&#8217;s a male-female difference. Women much prefer to look at the person. When I have female guests in studio, I tell them in advance, please forgive me if I don&#8217;t look at you while I respond. I want to concentrate 100% on every word a caller is saying.&quot;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I saw this movie with a gorgeous shiksa in a dark and empty theater and one thing led to another and we were groping each other in the dark like there was no tomorrow. Pictures of the Holocaust do that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=8016\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,21],"tags":[15739,29761,15741,15740,1088,15742,5842,13340,8314],"class_list":["post-8016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hollywood","category-personal","tag-andrew-gumbel","tag-dennis-prager","tag-horrors-of-war","tag-pictures-of-the-holocaust","tag-protagonist","tag-rabbi-shmuley","tag-roman-polanski","tag-shiksa","tag-world-war-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}