Beautiful picture

Ever since I first came across Flickr I am amazed at how tasteful, beautiful and sometime artistic content one can find there. Often I find myself scrolling through the pictures looking for an appropriate one for a post, or just to give myself some 'offline time'
Here's one

Image attribute: jpro747 on Flickr

Wonderful movies about life

Just been yesterday to one of the best movies I've ever seen: "Away From Her". I'm actually finding it difficult to call it a movie, because its so much more than that. Its a story of life, its an experience, and its a source for a lot of thought and insight. IMDB's plot outline is: "A man coping with the institutionalization of his wife because of Alzheimer's disease faces an epiphany when she transfers her affections to another man, Aubrey, a wheel chair-bound mute who also is a patient at the nursing home.". I think of it as the sad, endless loneliness of old age. Sure, one might argue that to make the point, the movie emphasizes the point, and skips real life, which is an average of uplifting events, family and joy, and also the sadder ones. But in reality, I think that for most of us the occurrences of sadder events is more frequent as age comes to play. And this is, if everything on the way goes right. A young couple beginning their journey together, spend 44 years together, and by the time they learn to really appreciate and love one another, one of the fades away. And the other one just don't know what to do. One of the scenes I did like the most was when Marian tells Grant, whose sufferring from loosing his wife to Alzheimer's: "I know what you're doing. But please, can you at least pretend?"

And, once again, like so many other great things, this movie comes from Ontario, Canada.

I guess one of the reasons to be thinking about this is when you hit your 35's (give or take), is when your parents usually start having similar and other issues...health, loneliness, future fears. So in a way, its a subject close to heart.


Two other great films that fall into the category of 'hard hitters' (in my book) are "The Notebook" (Not very dissimilar story, about years-long love between a couple and how they cope with her memory loss".













Another one called "Awakenings", with Robin Williams and Robert De-Niro. Awakenings deals with a doctor that tries to fight encephalitis epidemic that paralyzes its victims over time, whether young or older. He finds this medicine that might make a difference and he does indeed bring them back...while at it he finds a friend (Robert De-Niro) that drives him to research more. At the (sad) end the doctor has to increase the dosage to keep the effect until eventually he looses them back to their silence. Robin Williams himself has done a truckload of meaningful movies like these, but that's a subject for another post.

If you have a small town old-style movie theater, I recommend seeing "Away from her", and , if you can, the other two as well. Good movies.

The beginning

So, the impossible reality of things being free. A short while back I didn't have a blog, didn't know too much what a blog is and what it can be used for. Now it seems what I thought would be my one and only blog, is more of a promotional machine for the company I'm working for, and there's no room there for personal thoughts. So I'm starting a new one...Two blogs, who would have believed.
Its funny because I was never a big writer (nor am I suggesting that I am one now). Always when we went on big trips or vacations, I wanted to write a mini diary. But in reality, 99.9% of our pictures have no tags on them, and we're fighting fading memory cells to remember the context.
So we'll see how much I keep up with it...