Vokzal Dlya Dvoikh

 Movie comments  1 Response »
Jul 212007
 

We watched part of Railway Station for Two again tonight. It’s my 3rd or 4th time. My major excuse is that it’s a good one for learning the language, which it is indeed. But I continue to be amazed. That had to have been a subversive film in pre-Gorbachev Russia. It would be a subversive film even in the U.S., at least in the vicinity of our major universities, for its portrayal of the values of private property and free markets.

I only hope that Madame Hillary’s prison camps will be as gentle as the Siberian gulag shown in that film.

And I continue to enjoy that Russian actors know how to act like they’re really cold when it’s supposed to be cold out, though it may have helped that the Siberian winter segments were filmed on site in winter. Hollywood has no clue how to portray winter realistically, but these people do. One thing not even the Russians can do is show how emaciated a person looks when deprived of food. This one has a charming way of making the point, though, in passing.

Too bad Netflix has very few of Eldar Ryazanov’s films. This one makes me want to see more. But I just now moved “The Irony of Fate, or ‘Enjoy your bath'” to the top of my Netflix queue. (Well, not quite the top. I’ve promised to get “Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tage” next, and I’m looking forward to another viewing of that one, too.)

A multi-lingual, English-as-Official-Language society

 Miscellaneous  No Responses »
Jul 042007
 

Paul Greenberg writes:

I’m all for the wonderful mosaic of cultures in this country – social, religious, linguistic, culinary and every other kind in this country of countries. Each contributes something to the way we all see things, think about things. We learn from each other. But here there is room for only one, indivisible, unhyphenated civic culture. A civic and civil culture that gives us a common tongue to argue in, and common ground to stand on.

Note that having English as the one official language of this country, the language used for government work, would be quite compatible with our being more of a multi-lingual society. It would be quite compatible with kids learning more languages in school, and perhaps ought to be accompanied by such if it were ever to be made official policy. It’s no threat to our having a multitude of cultures and languages — unless all aspects of our cultures and private lives become government business. If that’s the case, then government is too big.

This was in Paul Greenberg’s recent article on immigration reform : Me, Ma, and Ben Franklin. So was Greenberg for the recent immigration bill or against it? He explains in the introductory paragraph to the article in which the above quote appeared.

I didn’t much like the immigration bill that just stalled in the U.S. Senate. In fact, I disliked it. Intensely. And I was for it. You can imagine how the folks who were against it felt about the bill.