Yesh Li Blog: Movies

Monday, February 20, 2012

Children of a Lesser God

Tonight we watched "Children of a Lesser God." It won an Academy Award in 1986, but we had never seen it. It was excellent, and I highly recommend it. It is touching and romantic, a "feel-good" evening's entertainment.

The synopsis online: "Children of a Lesser God" is a love story about a speech teacher who falls for a beautiful yet distant deaf girl in a small New England school for the deaf, and the obstacles that they face due to their differences.

Marlee Matlin won an Academy Award for "Best Actress in a Leading Role" for the movie in 1986.

Wikipedia
imdb

Sunday, March 16, 2008

For Music Lovers: August Rush

August Rush.

If you love music, you'll love this film.

If you love tear jerkers with a happy ending, you'll love this movie.

If you can suspend disbelief and love a totally unlikely but thoroughly enjoyable fable, you'll love this production.

Favorite quotes from the film:

"You know what music is? God's little reminder that there's something else besides us in this universe; harmonic connection between all living beings, everywhere, even the stars."

"The music is all around you, all you have to do is listen."

Here's a trailer

This movie combines the classical (Keri Russell's character playing with the New York Philharmonic)

with the contemporary (Jonathan Rhys Meyers's character playing with a rock band).

August is a modern-day Mozart, a musical prodigy to whom music comes as naturally as breathing!

Here he is conducting the New York Philharmonic in a rendition of his composition, August's Rhapsody.

Why Yesh Li Blog?

Why do I have a blog? Quite simply, I have a blog to share my favorite things with others. The right side of the blog has a long list of links to some of the places on the Internet that I visit often. In addition to sharing those with others, I often come here myself to find a quick link to where I am going.

Bonnie, our eldest, led the way into blogging with her Simple Beauty Blog, and later with her extremely popular Beans Blog. I decided I would give blogging a try and thought "I have a blog" might be a clever name, but in English it sounded rather lame, so I did it in Hebrew, a language I love more and more the more I learn it.

What does Yesh Li Blog mean?

We would translate (i.e. interpret) yesh li blog to mean "I have a blog" in English, but the literal Hebrew means "There is for (or to) me a blog." You cannot literally say "I have" something or other in Hebrew. It is always "there is for me," or "there is for you," or "there is for us," etc. Hebrew, the language of the Bible, is showing us that we are really stewards of what has been provided for us and for our use. Rather than private ownership, perhaps a better term for what we "own" would be private stewardship.

Languages have been my passion since at least the fourth grade, when I studied Spanish from a library book called Fun with Spanish. In high school, I was the rara avis that became enamored of Latin. In later U.S. Navy tours of duty in Spain, Italy, and Japan, we did our best to learn the local languages. Along the way, I studied some Russian and picked up some Greek by studying etymologies and some Chinese by studying Japanese writing systems.

My first introduction to Hebrew was in the early 1980s, when I took a correspondence course, but it was not until the past decade that my primary focus has been on this wondrous language. It has been deeply rewarding, and especially in the past few years since we met Ori, an amazing Israeli woman, who has become not only my primary Hebrew mentor but also our good friend. Moreover, the small group of people who meet weekly to study Torah in Hebrew in Boulder have become dear to us and enriched our lives greatly. Further, reading Jewish commentaries on the Web of the weekly Torah portions has deepened my own faith and opened up new understandings of the scriptures we share and of Christian writings based on those scriptures.

The pursuit of words has been an essential part of my life for many years (since birth?). Many things have changed in my life, but I don't see that part of it changing any time soon (until death?). Lehitraot! Shalom, Chaverim!