ellauri147.html on line 608: Winnicott's theoretical slipperiness has been linked to his efforts to unclify Kleinian views. Yet whereas from a Kleinian standpoint, his repudiation of the concepts of envy and the death wish were a resistant retreat from the harsh realities he had found in infant life, he too has been accused of being too close to his mother, and of sharing in Klein's regressive shift of focus away from the Oedipus complex to the pre-oedipal.
ellauri428.html on line 268: According to de Bres’s neat distinction, some narrativists are relationists, who hold that it is the obtaining of certain causal relations among parts of a life that contributes (in part) to its meaningfulness. I, for example, have argued that our lives as agents consist of a succession of (often overlapping) projects, and that other things being equal, it contributes to meaningfulness if later projects build on earlier ones. Here building on the past means, for example, that later projects are more successful or have more valuable aims because of earlier ones, or fulfill aims that were left unrealized earlier. So the claim is that having a progressive structure – rather than a repetitive or disconnected or regressive one – makes a life more meaningful, other things being equal. Lives with such a structure are narratable in a certain kind of story that is apt to arouse admiration or pride, but no one need actually tell the story. (Let me add here parenthetically that it is a real pleasure to read a paper that presents one’s view as accurately and fairly as de Bres does!) De Bres rejects relationism, because she doesn’t believe that the mere existence of a causal relation between parts of a life is the sort of thing that could contribute to value or meaning (8-9). I’ll come back to this below.
xxx/ellauri169.html on line 468: This Finnish film is heavy-handed, regressive, and short-listed for an Oscar.
xxx/ellauri169.html on line 473: Esim venäläisvastainen, Israel-myönteinen näkövinkkeli olisi ollut nyt enemmän kuin paikallaan. Mutta ei, its heavy-handed, tendentious, and regressive! Pahassa ryssämiehessä on muka jotain lieventäviä asianhaaroja. Hah, paskan marjat, paha mikä paha! Ryssä on ryssä vaikka sen voissa paistaisi. Mutta se onkin ulkkareiden oscar-ehdokas. Eine osaa, eivät edes yritä. Missä räväyttävät käänteet, missä car chaset, missä reippaat länkkärit, missä antiryssäily? Eihän tästä tule yhtään mitään, yhtä vätystelevää kuin Aki Kaurismäki. Vitun autistit!
xxx/ellauri250.html on line 433: Sometimes you can tell from the first shot. In “Compartment No. 6,” the camera follows a young woman at a party as she leaves a bathroom and enters a living room full of gathered friends. That walking, back-of-the-head shot is one of the soggiest conventions of the steadicam era, a facile way of conveying characters’ own fields of vision while anchoring the action on them. The familiarity of this trope suggests both limited imagination and an unwillingness to commit to a clear-cut point of view. When used cannily, it can convey ambiguous neutrality and looming mystery, but, more often, it suggests the merely functional recording of action, which is exactly what’s delivered in “Compartment No. 6,” opening in theatres on Wednesday. The movie sinks, fast and deep, under the weight of dramatic shortcuts, overemphatic details, undercooked possibilities, unconsidered implications. It’s heavy-handed, tendentious, and regressive—and it should come as no surprise that it’s on the fifteen-film shortlist for the Best International Feature Oscar.
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