Ataraxia

  The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams   How many of us live in a Glass Menagerie? What does The Glass Menagerie stand for?   This is what I think about, now that I try to figure out what this play gave me and how to make sense of it all. One way to look at it may be to consider the fragility of Laura Wingfield and her family as an exception. The other possibility would be to see Amanda, Tom and Laura- mother, son and daughter respectively- as representing all of us. We all feel weak, if not always at least some of the time. If we do not have a slight handicap, or “challenge” as is the rule of addressing it today, we do come short in one department or another. I get angry very quickly, you could be shy and so on. Shyness is the feature that comes to mind when we speak of Laura, who has a problem with one foot and considers herself handicapped. This is an example of what a negative mindset can do: if we condition ourselves to fail, we will, or in the words of Henry Fo...

  Merci pour le Chocolat, written by Caroline Eliacheff and Claude Chabrol, based on the novel by Charlotte Armstrong 9.6 out of 10 Merci pour le Chocolat is the kind of crime story where we do not have a murder and then we follow in the footsteps of Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes or another famous detective to observe who has done it, but on the contrary, we gradually, starting from early on, suspect that Marie-Claire ‘Mika’ Muller aka majestic, divine Isabelle Huppert is acting strangely and she surely would soon take a hatchet or a bazooka and summarily end the life of multitudes and if not, well, at least a dozen would have to be dispatched… Early on, she is married to serene, eerie, levitating – but we soon see that because he is on drugs – Andre Polonski aka talented, outré, outlandish – not as in the stupid Trump’s impeachment trial – Jacques Dutronc – wondrous in Van Gogh – and we learn soon that the man is a successful, acclaimed pianist and she is the boss of a major com...

  Like Water for Chocolate, screenplay by Laura Esquivel, based on her novel                 This viewer has made some mistakes in connection with this film. Therefore, the note on Like Water for Chocolate is probably not just biased, but wrong as well. After all, most critics have loved it; the Metascore on IMDB shows an impressive and hard to believe:                  86!                 This means observers have not just liked this, but they were enchanted and mesmerized by Water and Chocolate.                 In addition, the motion picture was nominated for the Golden Globe and BAFTA for the very reputable:          ...

  The Big Short Screenplay by Charles Randolph, Michael Lewis and Adam McKay, directed by the latter is not just one of the best motion pictures of this century, but a GOAT, which combines superb acting, a terrifying subject, it won the Oscar and multiple prizes for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay, the whole production is stupendous – now for my self-promotion: you find more than five thousand notes on films from The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made and other sites, along with reviews of books from the Greatest Books of All Time and other lists on my blog and YouTube channel https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html     10 out of 10   The Big Short is a fabulous combination of terror, humor, complex financial lessons – well, the last part is not really true, I used a hyperbole, but hearing Margot Robbie as herself, explaining subprime was a treat, the dialogue and monologues do a lot to show what happened during,...

  ARTEMIS, THE HONEST WELL DIGGER by John Cheever A fantastic, wonderful story Artemis reminds me of my training- I have graduated at the University, in the Geophysics department, albeit I never worked in that field. Still, the preoccupation with digging wells, trying to find water rings a bell, for about seven years that was what I have been studying. “ARTEMIS LOVED the healing sound of rain—the sound of all running water—brooks, gutters, spouts, falls, and taps. In the spring he would drive one hundred miles to hear the cataract at the Wakusha Reservoir. This was not so surprising, since he was a well driller and water was his profession, his livelihood as well as his passion. Water, he thought, was at the root of civilizations.” As I know so well by now, this story, like the other stories of this fantastic writer, has a lot going for it- humor, surprising plot. The characters are interesting and at times I do not know if I should laugh or feel sorry, but often it has to be both....

  The Stone Nest by Hella Wuolijoki For lack of better information, I have this listed based on the Romanian adaptation of a play that I do not know what is called like originally and anyway I did not like- 6 out of 10     Not exactly a spoiler alert, since I will not say anything about the end of the play, or indeed much about it at all… But an alert is in order anyway, for I guess that these notes will be much more of a view on Scandinavian ways. The play itself was not much to my liking and it may come down to my unenthusiastic opinion of the Nordics. They seem to be all the rage and they dominate world rankings for almost anything, from GDP per head to happiness levels. -            May this be a case of hidden envy? Perhaps, but I am not that thrilled with the Nordic miracle. I have worked for Radio Sweden in 1990, for some months and for Helsingin Sanaomat and found the correspondents cold. Very, very cold. When I th...

  The Godfather: Part II, based on the novel by Mario Puzo The Godfather Part II is an exhilarating, magnificent chef d’oeuvre, one of the best ten films ever made. Some feminists criticize this work of art as expressing the male admiration for a violent mobster. Even if there is some grain of truth in that statement, the reality is much more complex, like the protagonist of the motion picture. Michael Corleone is the Godfather in this sequel to the other masterpiece, wherein Marlon Brando was Vito Corleone. In addition, this is both a hero and the evil character, making the film so much more interesting, with his complicated personality. Some of the Character Strengths that the leader of one of the most powerful Mafia families has are: -            Bravery, Curiosity, Persistence, Perspective, even Citizenship at the time of his volunteer enrollment in the army -            Also Lea...