Resources for November 25, 2013

Roger Ebert's classic: "How To Read a Movie."

Alison Nastasi for Flavorwire: "The Most Emotional Scores."

David Hudson for Keyframe: "Georges Lautner, 1926 – 2013: The French director worked with the likes of Ventura, Belmondo, and Delon."





Kelly Heyboer for the Star-Ledger: "Tensions rise at Kean U. as officials recommend denying tenure to 2/3 of eligible professors"

Cara Buckley for The New York Times: "Police Unsure if Random Attacks Are Rising Threat or Urban Myth: ‘Knockout Game’ a Spreading Menace or a Myth."

Noah Isenberg and Rob White in Film Q!uarterly "debate the politics of Roman Polanski's stage play adaptation": "Carnage and All: A Discussion."

Sanford Schwartz for The New York Review of Books: "Surrealism Made Fresh."

Andy Battaglia for Film Comment reviews a new modern score acompanying a recent DVD release of the 1921 classic film The Phantom Carriage: "The Metal Beast: A most unorthodox Victor Sjöström remix."

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary Word-of-the-Day:

dragon's teeth Pronunciation\DRAG-unz-TEETH\
noun
1 : seeds of strife; 2 : wedge-shaped concrete antitank barriers laid in multiple rows

EXAMPLES

The political analyst insisted that the government's policy was misguided and would only sow dragon's teeth by increasing poverty and discontent.

"Assiduously sown by the Kremlin, the dragon's teeth of demagoguery, paranoia, xenophobia, anti-Westernism, intolerance, and obscurantism are bound to yield a toxic harvest when the regime falters or loses control outright." — From an article by Leon Aron, posted October 24, 2013 at american.com

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne's child, Pearl, "never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon's teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she rushed to battle." In Hawthorne and elsewhere, "dragon's teeth" alludes to a story involving Cadmus, the legendary Phoenician hero reputed to have founded Thebes and invented the alphabet. The tale holds that Cadmus killed a dragon and planted its teeth in the ground. From the teeth sprang fierce armed men who battled one another until all were dead but five. These founded the noblest families of Thebes and helped build its citadel.