Tarantino Kubrick

For a few years I have refused to watch Reservoir Dogs. Perhaps to ensure that I would not do so on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, I saw it last night. What struck me was the connection to Kubrick's The Killing.

The one maps to the other not at all like quotation and not through obvious parallel ( I see now out on the web that QT is said to call RD "My Killing".)

But what is it - beneath, behind, at root  - to be struck with such a relatedness across two films which are otherwise so very different?  Is it the result of watching films as "types" - perhaps reinforced by serial television, by "westerns" ?

These links are not self-evident as "associations" - they seem to me to be based on my limited capacity to talk about film - itself a requirement for "intellectual" standing of any rank among avid conversationalists, let alone cinema mavens.

Perhaps it only strikes me so, given my struggle to recognize faces, and the embarrassment of familiar faces which prove to belong to complete strangers.

And then there is the resident of the Victoria, BC area, who has been my Doppelgänger these past 40 years — if brief exchanges with the few strangers who accost me first are to be accorded any credence.  Have we aged in so similar a manner?

"Der Oger" and "The Syrian Bride"

Last evening we finally watched "The Syrian Bride".  Hearing Russian and French and Arabic was almost as much a treat as had I been allowed popcorn.  But the disappointment: at my elbow in my work-corner of the sofa is Veza Canetti, "Der Oger".  It is impossible to notice that the first son and his wife and son, (sons all bearing the name of the patriarch,) could not be living in an Israeli city, that she could not be a Jew, not even an unbelieving Russian Jew and certainly they could not be speaking Yiddish, let alone living in Vienna.  We know they could not be living in Lublin or Vilna.  They live in Russia.
The foreign wife's name was surely Helen and she would be a healer.  She does not have a wide face and thick, dark hair.  She is slender.  I know as surely as I know anything that Veza would have felt outrage.  Only worse would be if he had rescued his Russian bride from one of the reinstated Baltic states.  Where was the lack of courage? He could have found an ethnic Lithuanian in Kazakhstan from that other Diaspora or any other.
That she is blonde is the very worst cliché - the easiest, most facile sign of the other for the Druze family.
Yes, the blonde and red-haired Hasidim, I met them on the streets of Outremont where they would not acknowledge my existence let alone that I understood their Yiddish (unlike the urbane Orthodox who were even inter-married, who met in DP camps and on boats when crossing to us over the Atlantic.)
Do we really imagine that Putin could have helped resolve the impasse on the Golan?  He only envies the cult of personality achieved in Damascus and fears the cruel political satire of the Israeli press.
Yet Israel Film and Berlin Brandenburger participated in this French film project (have we already forgotten the role of France in the preposterous borders?)
Borders.  At least the fool, the uni-glot Kohl, committed to the Polish border, an essential prerequisite to tolerating reunification.  And who remembers the present circumstances of a Kaliningrad?  And where is Lublin?