Le Compte de Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas author of The Man in The Iron Mask http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-iron-mask-aka-le-masque-de-fer.html and many other popular books - 9 out 10

 

Le Compte de Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas author of The Man in The Iron Mask http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-iron-mask-aka-le-masque-de-fer.html and many other popular books

9 out 10

 

 

You must watch the remarkable L’Autre Dumas, with Gerard Depardieu in top form as Alexandre Dumas and Benoit Poelvoorde -one of the greatest actors in the world, though few would know his name, and even fewer would be able to pronounce it (maybe this is just the wrong feeling, seeming as it looks so complicated to me) the one who shocked the cinephiles in Man Bites Dog aka C’est Arrive Pres De Chez Vous http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/02/cest-arrive-pres-de-chez-vous-aka-man.html what a phenomenon!

 

In L’Autre Dumas we find that Auguste Maquet, played by mesmerizing Benoit Poelvoorde in the adaptation for the big screen – may have been the ghost writer , and hence the author of some of the most celebrated novels…I think I have read in The Russian Girl http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-russian-girl-by-magister-ludi.html by Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis about Dumas

It said that he has had African ancestry, maybe the grandmother was black, I forgot what exactly was the relative, maybe it was his grandfather, and it could well be in another book that this mentioned, together with other personal information on some of the other authors…more important would be Intellectuals by brilliant Paul Johnson http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/06/intellectuals-by-paul-johnson.html

 

Intellectuals lets us look behind the curtain, into the writing room, sometimes the bedroom of luminaries like Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Jacques Rousseau and others…Rousseau was so abominable as to leave his children at the door of the orphanage, at a time when nine out of ten died in such circumstances, but there are vile things the others have done, and many celebrated men

Le Compte de Monte Cristo is one of the best stories, and a very entertaining one, at least for a teenager, as I was when I first read it, in the meantime, I have seen some adaptations for the big or small screen and did not find them all that exhilarating, due to a lack of sophistication perhaps, this is not Marcel Proust after all

 

Marcel Proust is in fact the standard http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/06/un-amour-de-swan-by-marcel-proust.html as in nec plus ultra, nobody will take him off the pedestal, he is the best there is for yours truly, and though Le Compte de Monte Cristo is a good adventure book, there is a feeling that I would waste my time, if I were to take it up again now, or even if it were the first time, it lacks the amplitude

 

As it is, we are outraged when Edmond Dantes is unjustly taken to this awful prison, just because his enemy Mondego wants to take all, including Mercedes - by the way, have I read somewhere that the luxury brand also takes the name from a woman called Mercedes, and what a joke it was a few years back, when they still used their ad slogan ‘nothing but the best’, only they were losing serious ground against their main rivals, Audi and BMW, so the blague was change the line to ‘nothing but third best’

Dantes becomes somehow the epitome of the conquering hero, rising like the Phoenix bird from the ashes, he tumbles to the lowest point, a nadir reached in that terrible prison, and then finds this other prisoner, who gives him the secret of the treasure, then opportunely dies, so that our protagonist can use this tragic event to masquerade as a corpse and then climb back to the very top…we all know about this, right?

 

Harvard Professor Tal Ben Shahar had the most popular lectures in the history of that venerable institution, and the videos are available online, if you are interested, lessons on positive psychology, the art of happiness, mixing in those precious courses scenes from classic movies, such as Dead Poets Society, Seinfeld, comedians sagesse, Ellen De Generes is mentioned a few times, with insight into the life of the academic http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/04/choose-life-you-want-by-tal-ben-shahar.html

one of the mantras, the leit motifs is ‘learn to fail or fail to learn’ and we have the example of someone who went to work at The White House, in the most powerful administration in the world, near the center of tremendous power, after a superb evolution and then…committed suicide, because in this phenomenal climb to the top, he had never encountered a crisis, failure, and when a traumatic experience came about, the adversity could not be coped with and the remarkable fellow collapsed.

 

Thus, it makes sense to include a rule that deals with this kind of challenge, one you find in the majestic book by another happiness scholar, Sonja Lyubomirsky, from the West Coast of America, The How of Happiness http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-how-of-happiness-by-sonja.html has included   ‘Happiness Activity No 6: Developing Strategies for Coping-practicing ways to endure or surmount hardship or trauma’

Indeed, this is one element which is important in The Count of Monte Cristo, the way he deals with the massive fall into that dungeon is admirable, and then his story is one that can offer quite a few lessons in bravery, resilience – I mean, think about it, you and me would probably just disintegrate on the floor of that goddamn awful place and just wait in misery to have it all end and soon, presto, today, not later…

On the other hand, let us think of Fyodor Dostoyevsky   http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/06/notes-from-underground-by-fyodor.html who had been condemned to death and then pardoned in the last minute, as he was standing in front of the execution squad, went on to write how the man on death row (they were almost all men surely) would rather live on a bare rock in the middle of the ocean than die

You may wish to ask me about this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world or perhaps learn about the 1989 Revolution http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html

87 out of 100 for Brother's Keeper

75 out of 100 for Nunti, Botezuri, Inmormantari aka Weddings, Christenin...

84 out of 100 for The Honest Courtesan

68 out of 100 for Coyote Ugly

Ice Cold In Alex based on the book by Christopher Landon https://notesaboutfilms.blogspot.com/2022/10/about-classic-ice-cold-in-alex.html - 10 out of 10

 

Ice Cold In Alex based on the book by Christopher Landon https://notesaboutfilms.blogspot.com/2022/10/about-classic-ice-cold-in-alex.html

10 out of 10

 

 

This is a note about the mesmerizing motion picture, trying to connect it with the script of the movie is impossible for this cinephile, on goodreads one needs to be a librarian, in order to add a new book, or script, if you do not have the item listed already, as is the case for instance with what I see as the best film of 2022 by a long shot, and one of the best ten, so far into this century, The Banshees of Inisherin http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-banshees-of-inisherin.html blessed with a marvelous cast and director

 

There are a few motion pictures to watch, one of the most important is Close, which I understand to be one of the wonders of last year, but as we stand, the story of two friends (well, mates at least) who become estranged, because one of them starts thinking like Seneca http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-tao-of-seneca-happiness-and.html and realizes that life is too short if we waste it

Seneca in fact said something like ‘we have enough time, only look at the way we squander it, there are even humans who talk of killing time, when in fact we need to treat as the most important asset we possess, we are very wasteful with it…’ words to that effect at least I hope, this is what Colm seems to conclude

 

In Inisherin (or should we say on, seeing as this is an island) he had spent a lot of time with his buddy, but as the end approaches, Colm wants to create, compose music, refers to the immortality of Mozart – everyone has heard of Mozart he tells Padraic, the latter protests, for he does not know the composer, and thus ‘there goes your theory’…indeed, when you say ‘everyone’, this is either a figure of speech, or meant literally, in which case, that is wrong when you have just one ignorant fellow – and wants to stay away…

Ice Cold in Alex could be described as a classic war movie (indeed, classic motion picture in general) but it is much more complex than that, since we have the action taking place in World War II, in North Africa (the Alex in the title is actually short for Alexandria, where the hero wants to drink an Ice Cold Beer) only we have many more themes than the death and destruction that armed conflict brings to the world.

 

Seeing this film, one cannot help but think of the present war in Europe…it seemed that this calamity will be gone, becoming a relic of the past, as the luminary Yuval Harari argues in his marvelous books – one of them is the fabulous Homo Sapiens A Brief History of Tomorrow http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/homo-deus-brief-history-of-tomorrow-by.html humankind has reached a stage where prosperity, harmony more or less appeared to dominate the prognosis, until Putin has started his vicious ‘special operation’

 

Captain Anson, played by magnificent John Mills in the motion picture, has so many of the traits of the role model, without being Superman or Batman, he is courageous, resilient, kind, determined, able to cope with adversity and trauma, devoted, and the list can go on, there will probably be more admiring words to associate with him, however much he can sink into despair and show his vulnerability.

Given the immense stress, the trauma of the war, the captain has taken to drinking, to the point where he has become addicted, an alcoholic maybe we would say, but since he is given the task of taking this army truck and people to Alexandria, he has to find a way to cope with his weakness, and now there is another thinker I need to quote, Harvard Professor Tal Ben Shahar, who kept saying in his positive psychology lectures http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/07/positive-psychology-on-youtube-by.html ‘learn to fail, or fail to learn’, as one of the load stars, the most important rules we need to remember

 

The Harvard Professor mentions Edison and the ten thousand failed attempts to find the solution for artificial lighting, it took 10,000 failures for Edison to give the world the light bulb, albeit when asked, the inventor replied that ‘he did not fail, but just proved ten thousand ways that do not work’ something along these lines, but clearly this is not a quote…there is the example of a man who has reached the zenith in his career and life, committing suicide when faced with a serious crisis, because he had never had the chance to…fail

The small group of British subjects encounter the Germans, and a Captain vand der Poel (brilliantly brought to the screen by Anthony Quayle) the latter claiming to be a South African who knows German, thus being able to mediate, to influence the Germans and stop them from harming the travelling British.

 

However, early on, one of the nurses is wounded and then dies of the injuries inflicted when they had come under fire, the others pretend she is still alive, so that they could appeal to the humanity of the Nazis and make them allow for their progress towards a hospital, so that she can be saved, when this happens, we think maybe it would be all right, if not smooth sailing, at least we do not anticipate the obstacles to come

The South African (spoiler alert) is not what he claims, and somehow, the captain, sister Diana and Pugh realize that they have an enemy within their small group, they expose the -should we call him traitor, I guess it is the right label for someone who claims to share your values, and then you find he is actually in the other camp…incidentally, Aristotle spoke of the two crucial elements of tragedy, discovery and reversal, as in Oedipus http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/03/oedipus-rex-by-sophocles-and-adapted-by.html when the messenger comes and we have discovery and the upturn that makes the king take out his eyes, for he had killed his father and married his mother, in ignorance, and now he finds about it

 

Ice Cold in Alex is a splendid, magical film, something we should give young people in school to watch, so that they can learn how to be brave, munificent, loyal, resilient, see about Delayed Gratification, gratitude and so much more http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world and I took part in my own little war, as it is described here http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html

One of The Most Remarkable Films of 2022 - Corsage