Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

August 2007 activity

Total Log Entries: 52

Total Comments: 35

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Slaughterhouse Five / USA / 1972

Between his birth in Ilium, New York, and assassination several years later, Billy Pilgrim endures an alien abduction, the bombing of Dresden in WWII, a plane crash, and the death of his wife. At almost any instant, he is aware of each of these violent milestones as he is “unstuck in time,” and he remains disaffected by much of it because, I think, it has all served to thicken his numbness. The traits that would describe a man have become buried deep within an exterior of anonymity and indifference.

In Vonnegut’s novel, Billy Pilgrim is established as so naïve and shellshocked that you don’t entirely trust the clarity of his visions of the future and past (which he often sees in quick succession). He’ll describe his lodging on the planet Tralfamadore, but he remains rooted behind enemy lines in Germany, plodding through the snow, with others, toward a POW camp. In the film – which emulates Vonnegut’s fractured narrative closely – Billy’s travels command a variety of set pieces; the film is about where he goes and what he sees, whereas its source is foremost concerned with how these places and experiences affect him. It’s an admirable effort, even if Vonnegut’s innovative literary techniques resist adaptation. So it goes.

by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Universal Studios DVD
15 Aug 2007 9:28 AM | Submit Comment

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