journal features

movie review - Before Sunset

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2004.11.14

I never saw the first part of this story, the early-90's "before sunrise". But I enjoyed this simple (and short, at ~75 minutes) story of a couple that meets in Paris some nine years after a one night stand that occurred in the early twenties. Now older but no wiser, they recount their reactions to that first encounter, and everything that's happened since, and.... Well, you'll have to see it.

It's strange that a movie that's made of essentially four or five long shots could go so quickly, but the conversation that the two characters has bears it well. They're both full of shit, to some extent, but who isn't.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)