HEIMAT

This past week I've spent watching Edgar Reisz' German miniseries Heimat.  It's about 14 hours long, and we had it out of the library for only a week.  I watched about two and a half hours a day, which is why I haven't been posting here.  Fifteen years ago I saw the first half. (It was vaguely familiar to me, and I confirmed I'd seen it before when I saw the scene where three top-level Nazis get invited to the big house.  I also remembered stuff like the guy disarming bombs.)

The show's a pretty stunning depiction of life in a village in Germany's Hunsruck region before, during and after the Nazi era.  Granted that the second half, set after 1945, isn't as good as the first.  It's like with Gunter Grass' novel The Tin Drum, where the third section, also set in the postwar period, wasn't as good as the first two, and was omitted from the movie version. (Everything after the Nazis is bound to seem anticlimactic.)

You wouldn't think I'd have any time for movies, but I managed to see two documentaries at the Bloor.  Friday I saw The Great Flood, a documentary of pre-sound footage of the Mississippi flood of 1927.  Then this afternoon I saw Errol Morris' Donald Rumsfeld documentary The Unknown Known. Scary guy!

I ordered a copy of The Innocents Abroad from Chapters-Indigo online.  I splurged on postage, and it arrived the next day.  I only had a hundred pages left and it'll be finished soon.  I've checked the TTC lost & found, but the book hasn't shown up there.  Maybe they've returned it directly to the library.