Posted on 08/13/2004 1:42:24 AM PDT by JustAmy
Good luck with the move.
We will be looking forward to hearing about school this coming year. When do classes start?
Can't you get TS to come help you move? :)
Good morning, Bob.
Thank you for sharing "My Frequent Prayer" with us. I'm sure several of us can relate to Emily Dickinson's poem.
Hope you are having a beautiful Sunday.
Amy- You should submit that photo to "Rate my Puppy"= what a cutie!!!
It's a beeeaautiful Sunday here, apres the storm. Goodbye, Charlie!!
Pippin will back me up on that. Hey, Pipster, a local politician is banking on the popularity of your name -- E.J. Pipken.
I'm gonna vote for him. Anything to defeat a troll...
Howdy! Playin' ketchup on FR today. :^)
Nope. Wolf boy here is about fourteen hours or something ridiculous like that away from Tulip's *current* place, and about nine or ten hours from her new place.
Yeah. But you can still come up to the new place to help me unpack. And I thought it was only 8 hours from your place to the new place. :)
Thanks, Amy. Classes start August 23. So I have a week to settle in. Luckily, my computer is still set up for the internet at school. So I'll be able to go online right away. And if all else fails, I'll just say hi from my office/cubicle. :)
More Than Humanly Possible
The Olympics in Greece have officially begun. Along with the traditional hopes and expectations of success by individual athletes and entire nations, there is also a palpable concern and angst about potential terrorism at the first games since 9/11. To prevent any terror attacks the Greeks have spent a record amount of money putting in place a vast and varied web of security and protection. In fact, one Greek official voiced that what they had done was “more than humanly possible.”
“More than humanly possible” – now there’s a statement. At first I thought that something must have been lost in the translation from Greek to English (which wouldn’t be a first). Then I wondered if it might be a new example of hyperbole (unlike others that I have heard a million times before). After all, if humans do something, it’s not more than humanly possible right? But, in the end I have concluded that those 4 words spoken can be very accurate and true indeed – when you factor God in.
The Christian life is impossible for humans to live. Jesus said, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5) It has always been so. That’s why the disciples had to wait in Jerusalem after the resurrection – for power. (Acts 1:4-8) Such absence of self-reliance and self-sufficiency flies in the face of the Western world’s “unlimited human potential” approach to life.
Too often it is our approach to church as well. After all, why wait for God when we can manipulate things our way through television, nominating committees, stewardship campaigns, forced levels of education, and grasped leadership in the name of upholding traditions or in the name of breaking them? All of those thing are fine when actually empowered by God, but alone they are, well, Godless and powerless to accomplish anything eternal beyond this mortal life.
For the sake of our athletes, and peace in the world, I do hope that God has enabled the Greeks to set up security beyond what they could do only by their own effort. After that, the Olympics should remain a place where unaided human accomplishment is showcased. Church, however, must be a place where, through Jesus, we only do what is more than humanly possible.
It’s a toss-up as to whether this film should be seen just before diving or not, but anyone who wants to continue diving should see it to test his/her ability to identify and avoid the various risks.
Open Water -- http://openwaterfilm.com/
avg. user rating (1-10): 10, 80 minutes, USA (2003), directed by Chris Kentis
starring Blanchard Ryan, Daniel Travis, Saul Stein, Estelle Lau, Michael E Williamson, Christina Zenarro, Jon Charles
Low budget shark attack thriller. When a scuba diving trip goes wrong a young couple find themselves drifting alone in the sea off the coast of the Bahamas. Based on a true story
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Review by Stefan Ulstein, 08/06/04, http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/reviews/openwater.html
If Van Helsing plays like a Stephen King novel, Open Water plays like a Jack London short story: The Call of the Wild, only with sharks. The sky and the ocean become characters. Their unpredictable moods shape the characters' responses. Forgoing computer generated digital tricks, director Chris Kentis drops us into the open sea, swimming with wild, live sharks—in their territory. No mechanical man-eaters or smoothly gliding fins here. The sharks' movements are quick, frantic, and disorienting. Kentis filmed the underwater scenes himself, while his collaborator and wife, Laura Lau, handled the shots filmed from the dive boat.
The scariest part, though, is that the film is based on the true story of a couple who were accidentally left behind on a diving excursion on Australia's Great Barrier Reef—left behind to fend for themselves against the elements, including sharks, in the open water.
"We liked the simple premise of the story," Kentis said at a Seattle International Film Festival interview. "We liked the challenge of telling a story without resorting to rubber sharks and digital effects."
Open Water is not a shark movie. It's a very real situation, filmed in an intimate, compelling style. In the movie, a professional couple, Susan (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel (Daniel Travis) heads to the Bahamas for a dive vacation. The dive captain makes an inaccurate head count, leaving Susan and Daniel floating in the endless sea.
"We were aware of the situation where a dive couple was left behind on the Great Barrier Reef," said Lau, "but we didn't feel driven to re-create the details of their ordeal." Kentis added, "We're divers ourselves, and we wanted to tell the story in as real a way as possible. We worked hard to avoid the usual clichés in this kind of a movie, opting for something original."
Thus, the plot and action are not what we expect. Open Water delivers an almost documentary-style immediacy. The decision to use relatively unknown actors allows us to see them as people in danger, rather than as movie stars bobbing around in a tank.
Kentis and Lau were influenced by the Dogme 95 movement, in which independent filmmakers vowed to shed the elaborate tricks of computer animation and monster budgets. Kentis: "We didn't feel that we needed to be bound by the Dogme Vow of Chastity, but we liked the idea of hand-held cameras, location shooting and available light whenever possible." Open Water is shot on High Definition Video, which is dramatically less expensive than 35-millimeter film. (The video is transferred to 35-millimeter for the projection print, however.) One advantage of shooting on video: when the weather changed, or sharks and jellyfish appeared, they could start shooting right away. "With film stock," said Lau, "you have to load the camera and you're out of film in twenty minutes. You can't be spontaneous."
The dive boat captain served as an actor, but he was also something of a director as well. He knew the ocean intimately. He could spot a storm and tell Kentis and Lau exactly how much time they had before the wind or rain would change the whole set. They could decide to run for cover or use it in the film. Following Kentis and Lau's desire to keep it real, the divers were regular people whose "salary" was a free dive. "We did use shark wranglers," Lau explained. "They knew and had worked with these particular sharks. So these were sharks that lived and hunted on our locations. They were wild, not trained."
Kentis and Lau's lean format gives Open Water a sense of intimate realism that gets lost in over-produced Hollywood films. It allows the filmmakers to create something that is truly theirs. The swollen budgets of big movies require that endless committees of executives rewrite the script and dictate additions and deletions. This explains why so many films seem the same, and why they are becoming even more fantasy driven. Plot and character take a backseat to dazzle and glitter, and the endings are comfortably familiar.
"Special effects are certainly valid, especially in The Lord of the Rings and films like it," said Kentis. "This is simply a different kind of film."
The style is reminiscent of the 1970s when independent filmmakers like Martin Scorsese moved out of the studios and onto the streets. Better film and smaller cameras allowed location filming, which lowered costs and encouraged originality. The '70s movies were driven by story and character, rather than fast editing and special effects. "That's why I still like those movies," Kentis said. "When a car rolled over, you thought, There's a real guy in there. We wanted to bring that sense of real experience to this movie."
"What's interesting," said Lau, "is that the new computer technology is what has allowed us to move into simpler, less technology-dependent movie making." High Definition Video technology allows Dogme 95-style directors to go into the streets, or in the case of Open Water, into resorts, beaches and the ocean. "Nobody is aware that we're making a movie, because, with our small cameras, we look like tourists. We can use locations and real crowds without having to block off streets."
The actors (Ryan and Travis) appreciated the scaled-back—and laid-back—approach.
"We told the actors up front, 'You'll be doing your own hair,'" said Lau. "There won't be trailers and caterers. When it's lunchtime, we'll have lunch. We told them that the money was going into the film, not into perks and frills. They got involved in the creative process because of that. Sometimes we said, 'Let's break for lunch,' and they would say, 'No. Let's use this light, or these waves.'"
Sailors and divers will appreciate this approach to using nature as a character. Out on the water, things can change very quickly. A breezy, sun-filled day can turn into a raging squall almost immediately. The water will be choppy and gray, then smooth and green. In a wave tank, you get water that doesn't look like water. The viewer is given a manipulated substitute for the ocean.
Open Water is no manipulated substitute. It's the real deal. The audience won't be saying, "I know how they made that rubber shark move through the water." Instead, they'll say, "Yikes! A shark just bit her!" Instead of saying, "What a great actress, especially the way she can emote this sense of aloneness," they'll be saying, "Man, she really is alone out there."
Kentis and Lau have labored to make an almost documentary-style film. It's meant to make us feel like we are really there, and to a large extent it succeeds.
As real and scary as it is, though, Kentis said he hopes that viewers "don't come away thinking that sharks are evil and diving is dangerous." Lau agreed: "Sharks in the water are majestic. When they attack people, it's by mistake. And diving is no more dangerous than many other sports. But we often go to a resort and just jump in the water, forgetting that it's a wild place. That's what we wanted to capture in this film. It's wild, and you can't predict."
Talk About It: Discussion starters
1. What would you say to your loved one if you thought you might die together?
2. Have you ever been out in the wild, or with wild animals, and realized that you did not respect their power? Have you ever feared for your safety in such a situation?
3. How would you deal with a situation in which you were absolutely alone?
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BTW, Happy Sit-Back-and-Relax-Day everyone, including Marissa and LouieMax!
Hi Victoria. A cool dip in a lake sounds real good about now.
Wanna come with me?
Yeah, but I was speeding.
(Love your new tagline, too. LOL.)
Hope you had a nice day.
Hope to see you here tomorrow or Tuesday . . . You have yourself a great week!
Hope you have a great day tomorrow.
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