Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

07 Apr 2002, 23:11 p.m.

I still have to clean the kitchen floor, and I…

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

I still have to clean the kitchen floor, and I have less time than I'd thought because of the silly time change. USians have a Daylight Savings thing going where we switch our clocks twice a year, in case you didn't know.

Leonard and I watched Keeping the Faith (his first time) and Casablanca (my first time) over the weekend. Casablanca is the Hamlet of film -- I kept reminding myself, "that wasn't a cliché until they did it." Of course, it was quite enjoyable, although I wish I hadn't known the ending ahead of time.

By the way, while renting the video at Reel, I asked the clerk whether my copy held the letterboxed or reformatted version of the film. He informed me that movies' aspect ratio only changed to the current (widescreen) format after the advent of television, and as such, any video of Casablanca is neither reformatted nor letterboxed, but in its original, TV-shaped format. I had forgotten those bits of trivia, and slunk away, shown up as the cinemaphile poseur I was.

I am surprised at how well Keeping the Faith held up to a second viewing; I even noticed a running end-of-scene bit of camerawork/cinematography in which the camera stays focused on a space which a character has just left. I'm not sure what that motif means, but it's there.

The last time I watched that movie I was a Hindu and I saw it with Dan. Now the "that's what faith is" speech makes me wince a little. Right now I miss believing -- knowing that there's a God, as I did just one scant year ago. I don't know who to call out to anymore.