Europe

Movie Review: “Dark Blue World”

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I learned about this Czech film a couple of years ago via screenwriter/blogger Robert Avrech. It’s not very well known in the U.S. and wasn’t then available on Netflix (though it is now), so I bought it, and just re-watched it…definitely a film worth seeing more than once. Friendship, love, and war, and some aspects of history that are probably unfamiliar to most Americans.

When Czechoslovakia was occupied by German troops in 1938, many Czech pilots made their way to the West and served with the Royal Air Force. After the war, surviving/returning pilots were imprisoned by Czechoslovakia’s new Communist government, which feared that they had been contaminated by Western ideas.

Franta Slama is a Czech air force captain. His younger protege and friend, Karel Vojtisek, is an aspiring fighter pilot. After the humiliating surrender of the airfield to an ungracious German officer, Franta and Karel escape the country via motorcycle. Franta leaves behind his girlfriend, Hanicka, and his beloved dog Barcha. Karel is not in a relationship, but is girl-crazy to a degree even greater that typical for his age.

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Put Up or Shut Up

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I haven’t been paying much attention to the whole Copenhagen climate summit debacle because my doctor told me that I should watch my blood pressure. Good advice, as even the few details that have leaked through my self-erected Wall of Silence threatens to blow the top of my head off.

A few weeks ago, back on Dec. 11, it was announced that the European Union was going to pony up $10.5 billion for aid to developing countries so they would be able to fix power-wasting infrastructure, and invest in cleaner technology.

But that cash wasn’t going to be passed out all at once. It was going to be doled out over three years. If my grade school math skills haven’t degraded away to nothing, then it seems to me that the EU will spend $3.5 billion per year.

It may be simple enough in concept, but it certainly isn’t enough in reality. The figure needed to actually make a dent in the increasing amount of pollution produced by the developing world will start at around $100 billion a year. And that money will have to be raised and passed around every year for pretty much forever!

Where is that kind of scratch going to come from?

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Posted without comment

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Well, not really.  Is this really so? Will he not attend?

1. Germany is going to have to wait longer than expected for US President Barack Obama’s first official visit. Citing government sources in Berlin, Reuters reported on Friday that Obama will not attend the anniversary festivities marking two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. –    Spiegel Online/International

2. Spouses and even children–researchers combing the Stasi files after the Wall fell were horrified to discover the payroll included 10,000 informers under the age of 18–were potential eyes and ears of the regime; friends were suspect; and strangers were presumed to be Stasi until proven innocent, and probably well beyond that. “Relations between people were conditioned by the fact that one or the other of you could be one of them,” writes Australian journalist Anna Funder in Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. “Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence.” –   Glenn Garvin, Reason

3. The pivotal scene in the magnificent new ( OPS: it’s a 2006 film) German movie The Lives of Others–which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film last week–takes place in an elevator. The year is 1984, and the occupant of the elevator is a severe and profoundly intelligent senior functionary of the East German security service named Wiesler. A stray word about the inhumanity of Stasi interrogations, or a joke about the dictator Erich Honecker, is all Wiesler needs to hear to make a simple mark on a piece of paper that will ruin someone’s life. – John Podhoretz, The Weekly Standard

UPDATE: Communist-era store windows, via boing boing.