Word: misunderstanding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1980
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...being President - but despite all the talk about the heavy burdens, the job is not too big for any one man. I get sick and tired of hearing people say you ought to have two Presidents. I don't have any sympathy for that argument. Don't misunderstand me. It is a job that takes about twelve to 14 hours a day. But what is wrong with that? The President of the United States ought to be willing to spend that land of time. Anybody who walks in there thinking he can punch a time clock...
Revenge is especially dangerous when it lumbers around shaggily between two cultures-like those of Iran and the U.S. - that profoundly misunderstand each other, that in some ways inhabit different centuries. The Iranians consider that they are exacting revenge for the years of America's association with the Shah. Thus grievances and countergrievances accumulate in some evolutionary rhythm, the way that grazing animals over the millenniums developed better teeth and, simultaneously, nutritional plants evolved harder thorns...
However, Schlondorff fails to give a similar sense of irony to a Beckettian sequence with an eel fisherman on a stark beach. While Oskar keeps a cold, dark view on life, the film changes tone: now it is bleak and blue, now it is warm and red. Does Schlondorff misunderstand his little hero or has he simply made only token efforts at linking each sequence to the whole? He manages to reduce the most profound chapter of Grass' novel, a discussion about art and life between a midget magician and a soliderly artist to a frolicking picnic atop a cement...