Nikos Kazantzakis's "Zorba the Greek" is a novel I have read three of four times; and I have seen the classic movie based on this novel more than a dozen times. To write critically about something that imprints itself on you is extremely hard, so I won't even try. For me, it is happiness enough to recall the mad laughter of Zorba (played by Anthony Quinn in what is surely his role of the lifetime), and the way he looks at the Boss (the narrator of the novel, an introspective intellectual, or in Zorba's words, a quill driver) and says this:

"What d'you lack? You're young, you have money, health, you're a good fellow, you lack nothing. Nothing, by thunder! Except just one thing - folly! And when that's missing, boss, well ..."

or this:

"You want to build a monastery. That's it! Instead of monks you'd stick a few quill drivers like your honored self inside and they'd pass the time scribbing day and night. [...] Well, I'm going to ask you a favor, holy abbot: I want you to appoint me doorkeeper to your monastery so that I can do some smuggling and, now and then, let some very strange things through into the holy precincts: women, mandolins, demijohns of raki, roast sucking pigs ... All so that you don't fritter away your life with a lot of nonsense!"

Now I know I am more like the Boss (with his reticence to going after women, especially beautiful ones like the Widow, played by Irene Papas) but I think I aspire to be Zorba, a volcano of pure passion, a man given to direct action or as Kazantzakis describes him:

"That is what a real man is like [...] A man with warm blood and solid bones, who lets real tears run down his cheeks when he is suffering; and when he is happy he does not spoil the freshness of his joy by running it through the fine sieve of metaphysics."

And of course, I desire to meet a Zorba too, who will teach me to dance the sirtaki, set to that wonderful music composed by Mikis Theodorakis, like this:

Last night to distract myself from insomnia (I was attempting to finish reading Seamus Heaney's "District & Circle"), I decided to watch the DVD of "Downfall" ("Der Untergang" in German) that I had checked out last weekend from the library.

It was as powerful a movie as the reviews I had read indicated it was. And Bruno Ganz is extremely compelling to watch as Adolf Hitler as he spirals into madness in the death thores of the Third Reich, while the Battle of Berlin rages outside the Führerbunker. The most compelling, and thus the chilling, scence of the movie for me, was the one in which Madga Goebbels, basically, murders her children with cyanide after drugging them with morphine.

It was only a few months ago that I had read Antony Beevor's masterful account "The Fall of Berlin 1945" (his "Stalingrad" is excellent too), and I had then wondered about the macabreness Beevor had written about in the Reich's final moments. And "Downfall" recreates, compellingly, how it would have been down there, in that bunker. I recommend that you watch it too, kind readers, for this movie may keep you up nearly all night.

is one of the most moving movies I have seen in the past few years. I remembering seeing it in the graveyard show, i.e., the show that begins at 11.30 PM in a theatre that had hardly ten or fifteen people in it. I have seen it a couple of times, in full or in part, since then. I have also tried to explain to others, and thus to myself, why I like this movie, in which, as one of my friends who didn't like it all that much commented, "nothing much happens". I think I will, for now, classify my tatse for this movie as one of those personal predilections that one can't really explain very well. So here is the final scene of the movie:

Other clips: lip my stockings, karaoke, making of Santori Times, a collage of scenes.