Writing about movies is hard. Which is why the Sunday Movie Marathon isn’t being posted on Sunday. And why this post will be pretty short.
I watched “Heir to an Execution” and “Derrida”, both documentaries. “Heir” is about a woman investigating the impact her grandparents had on the family. This is a made complicated by the fact that her grandparents were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. I was familiar with the Rosenberg case but was unaware that they left two sons behind. No one in the family would adopt them because of the stigma attached to their parents; they were finally adopted by Ann and Abel Meeropol. Oddly, it wasn’t mentioned in the movie, but Abel Meeropol was a songwriter, schoolteacher and union activist who wrote the song “Strange Fruit” in the late 1930s. I particularly enjoyed the interviews with all the old “progressives”, most of them as fiery as ever, despite their age.
“Derrida” is about French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Sorta. The filmmakers followed him for years, taping him eating breakfast, chatting with his wife and giving lectures. In between bits culled from all this the narrator reads passages from his books. The passages probably have something to do with what they’re showing of his life, or maybe something to do with the way the’re showing it, but for a beginner they were… incomprehensible. I don’t really feel like I know anything about his philosophy that I didn’t know before, and what I knew before was the word “deconstruction”. Just the word. I can say he seemed like a pretty nice guy. And he had crazy hair. I wish I had crazy hair.