Festival Quotes - page 3
Saving Silverman is so bad in so many different ways that perhaps you should see it, as an example of the lowest slopes of the bell-shaped curve. This is the kind of movie that gives even its defenders fits of desperation. Consider my friend James Berardinelli, the best of the Web-based critics. No doubt 10 days of oxygen deprivation at the Sundance Film Festival helped inspire his three-star review, in which he reports optimistically, "Saving Silverman" has its share of pratfalls and slapstick moments, but there's almost no flatulence." Here's a critical rule of thumb: You know you're in trouble when you're reduced to praising a movie for its absence of fart jokes, and have to add "almost"... as for Neil Diamond, Saving Silverman is his first appearance in a fiction film since The Jazz Singer, and one can only marvel that he waited 20 years to appear in a second film, and found one even worse than his first one.
Roger Ebert
Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica. It's a rebuke to the faith that the building represents. Cannes touchingly adheres to a belief that film can be intelligent, moving and grand. Godzilla is a big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie. It was the festival's closing film, coming at the end like the horses in a parade, perhaps for the same reason.
Roger Ebert
Seven of these 22 riots, or roughly one-third of them, occurred on the day of the celebration of the annual Muslim festival of Bakr-i-Id at the end of May. The celebration of this festival is always a dangerous time in Hindu-Muslim relations. The Muslim regard it as a day of animal sacrifice, and as the animal chosen is almost always a cow the slightest tension between the two communities is apt to produce an explosion. (Chapter 7)
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
Amerika is just another Latin dictatorship. Those who have doubts should try the minimal experience of organizing a large rock festival in their state, sleeping on some beach in the summer or wearing a flag shirt. Ask the blacks what it's been like living under racism and you'll get a taste of the future we face. As the repression increases so will the underground - deadly groups of stoned revolutionaries sneaking around at night and balling all day.
Abbie Hoffman
Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.
Lewis Thomas
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holy of holies of Jewish time. It is that rarest of phenomena, a Jewish festival without food. Instead it is a day of fasting and prayer, introspection and self-judgment when, collectively and repeatedly, we confess our sins and pray to be written into God's Book of Life.
Jonathan Sacks
I've spent a lot of very happy times in Edinburgh as a result of playing virtually every festival since 1996. It's also a beautiful city in its own right, is walkable, within sight of the sea and mountains - and was too far north for the Luftwaffe to have done any damage, hence the spectacularly beautiful architecture.
Marcus Brigstocke
It's a Rocket-raising: a festival new to this country. Soon it will come to the folk-attention how close Wernher von Braun's birthday is to the Spring Equinox, and the same German impulse that once rolled flower-boats through the towns and staged mock battles between young Spring and deathwhite old Winter will be erecting strange floral towers out in the clearings and meadows, and the young scientist-surrogate will be going round and round with Gravity or some such buffoon, and the children will be tickled, and laugh....
Thomas Pynchon
Mo: Clarice, you've gotta reconcile your feelings about leaving the neighborhood. It's not Ginger you're attracted to, it's what she represents. The co-op, the park, the block festival, the community!
Clarice: Oh, so it's really the community's inner thighs I want to drizzle with maple crème anglaise, which I then slowly lap up while straddling the tantalizing tongue of the co-op.
Alison Bechdel
This legible lesson, this ritual recording, must be repeated as often as possible; the punishments must be a school rather than a festival; an ever-open book rather than a ceremony. The duration that makes the punishment effective for the guilty is also useful for the spectators. They must be able to consult at each moment the permanent lexicon of crime and punishment. A secret punishment is a punishment half wasted. Children should be allowed to come to the places where the penalty is being carried out; there they will attend their classes in civics. And grown men will periodically relearn the laws. Let us conceive of places of punishment as a Garden of the Laws that families would visit on Sundays.
Michel Foucault
I tour a bit in America and a lot in Europe, Holland especially, where they have this forward-looking music scene because they got through the barriers 15 years ago. They gobble up the things I do. I go to the Far East - I like working with the orchestra in Singapore - but my favourite places tend to be the ones where it's more than turning up and doing a big concert. Next month I go to the Sydney Festival, where I've persuaded them to do the Lou Harrison concerto. As penance, though I don't mind it, I have to play the Gershwin concerto in the first half. And I hope to return year after year to South Africa, where I've been with the National Symphony Orchestra into Soweto. Education work is being done there for the first time. Previously they had never bothered to find new audiences, and now they are staring into an abyss which we may face too. Events there are a fast-forward version of what could happen here.
Joanna MacGregor
If you want to know what Churches were made for, come down here on some great festival of the Virgin; but come alone! That kind of knowledge cannot be taught and can seldom be shared. We are not now seeking religion; indeed, true religion generally comes unsought. We are trying only to feel gothic art. For us the world is not a schoolroom or a pulpit, but a stage, and the stage is the highest yet seen on earth. In this church the old romanesque leaps into the gothic under our eyes; of a sudden, between the portal and the shrine, the infinite rises into a new expression, always a rare and excellent miracle in thought.
Henry Adams
It's in human nature to mention any personal connection when offering solidarity, so I shall just briefly say that on my first visit to India, in 1980, I stayed at the Taj Mahal in Bombay, visited the "Gateway of India" and took a boat to Elephanta Island, toured the magnificent railway station, had my first diwali festival at Juhu beach, and paced the amazing corniche that was still known by some-after its dazzling string of lights-as "Queen Victoria's necklace." Wonderful though some of the 19th-century British architecture can be, Bombay is quintessentially an Indian achievement, and an achievement of all its peoples from the Portuguese-speaking Catholic Goans to the Zoroastrian Parsis.
Christopher Hitchens
To experience and live out a harmony with the world, in a manner quite different from that of everyday life - this, we have said, is the meaning of "festival." But no more intense harmony with the world can be thought of than that of "Praise of God," the worship of the Creator of this world. Now, as I have often experienced, this statement is often received with a mixture of discomfort and various other feelings, but its truth cannot be denied. The most festive festival that can be celebrated is religious worship or "cult," and there is no festival that does not get its life from such worship or does not actually derive its origin from this. There is no worship "without the gods," whether it be mardi gras or a wedding.
Josef Pieper
Leisure lives on affirmation. It [...] includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation.
The highest form of affirmation is the festival; and according to Karl Kerenyi, the historian of religion, to festival belong "peace, intensity of life, and contemplation all at once." The holding of a festival means: an affirmation of the basic meaning of the world, and an agreement with it, and in fact it means to live out and fulfil one's inclusion in the world, in an extraordinary manner, different from the everyday.
The festival is the origin of leisure, its inmost and ever-central source. And this festive character is what makes leisure not only "effortless" but the very opposite of effort or toil.
Josef Pieper
Let us now pose the question again: is recourse to the "human" really enough to preserve and firmly ground the reality of leisure? I intend to show that such recourse to mere Humanism is not enough.
It could be said that the heart of leisure consists in "festival." In festival, or celebration, all three conceptual elements come together as one: the relaxation, the effortlessness, the ascendancy of "being at leisure" [...] over mere function.
Josef Pieper
