Originally, I intended to talk about Kristoff Kieslowski's The Decalogue by posting ten times, once about each movie, but I've got a list of 12 movies behind them to post about, so I'm just going to make it an all-in-one hip, hip, hooray for an amazing body of work.

I saw a few of this director's more well-known movies back in high school, but determined that I'd watch more of his work eventually. Ten years later, I just watched ten one hour movies, each one focusing on a particular biblical commandment (being broken). The stories are connected by an apartment complex in which most of the main characters live, and occasionally, people from one movie cross over into another.

Quick rundown of the movies:

One: A father and his son use a computer to determine whether or not it's safe to go ice skating on a nearby pond. The computer serves as a god that the two have before their God, which leads to a very sad ending. This is possibly the saddest of all ten movies.

Two: Taking the name of "the Lord thy God in vain", this one is about a doctor who is approached by a patient's wife who wants to know whether her husband will live or die. She is pregnant by an affair. If her husband will live, she will abort the child, and if he will die, she will keep it. The doctor is forced to decide what to tell the wife, which also decides the fate of the baby.

Three: The Sabbath is far from holy when a woman disturbs her ex's Christmas Eve by making him help her hunt for her missing boyfriend, managing to keep him away from his family for the entire night.

Four: A young woman finds an envelope in her father's handwriting that says it isn't to be opened until his death. Not honoring her father, she opens it and finds another envelope from her dead mother. The possible contents could change the dynamic between the father and daughter, who both seem to harbor feelings of a more intimate love than they should.

Five: I may take back what I said about the saddest movie. This is about a young man who seems quite determined to kill someone, and takes it out on a taxi driver. His lawyer, a critic of capital punishment, has to cope as the young man is sentenced to death.

Six: A peeping Tom is obsessed with his promiscuous (adultery-committing) neighbor, whom he watches through a telescope in the apartment across the way. He reveals himself to her and has a bit of a traumatizing experience when she destroys his ideals of love.

Seven: The commandment against stealing is quickly broken when a young woman kidnaps her sister, who is actually her daughter, and takes her to her ex-boyfriend's home in an attempt to start a new life as a mother.

Eight: An ethics class serves as a place of uncomfortable confrontation when a professor is challenged with an ethical dilemma that sounds all too familiar. A woman who claims to be studying the professor's work turns out to be the young child that the professor refused to harbor during WWII. Bearing false witness is explored in two different ways in this story - the positive and negative effects it can cause.

Nine: Coveting takes the forefront when a man with cancer discovers he can no longer make love with his wife, and tells her to find a lover so that her needs can be fulfilled. Obviously, he turns out to be quite jealous. At least this movie, against the trend of all the other movies, ends with a bit of hope.

Ten: More coveting occurs when two sons inherit their father's stamp collection, worth millions of dollars.

Wow, that's a lot of writing, just in the summary! I think the idea behind this collection of movies is quite inspired, although necessarily a depressing one. There's no way to experience happiness when all of these sins are being convinced, and watching the whole set can take its toll on the viewer.

That being said, the stories are interesting, complicated, well-acted, wonderfully filmed, and set to great music. About sixty minutes apiece, they are able to accomplish more in such a short time than most movies I've seen. Each movie features a different cinematographer, and all are co-written and directed by Kieslowski.

I loved this moviewatching experience and will remember these movies well in the years to come. I have a few more Kieslowski movies in the queue and am excited to watch them all.

Holy. Crap.

Not sure how long this is going to be up, but it's a doozy. I recommend jumping to around 4:25 when he starts talking about SP's (Suppressive Persons, or non-Scientologists) and he busts out that freaky laugh of his. This honestly makes his Oprah appearance appear sane.

UPDATE: Found new video link.

So I got an email this morning from Dreamhost, our old webhost, saying we owed them almost $500. There were a couple things wrong about this. First, we are paid up until sometime later in the year. Second, they charged double what we owe. We were going to cancel anyway since we have our own server now and this just puts the nail in that coffin. Check out the status blog post with over 600 comments. That's just nuts. It turns out that people who had a credit card on file (thank goodness we didn't!) actually got charged the insane amounts. I can only imagine the overdraft charges and over limit charges that may or may not get reversed and all the hell people are going to have to go through due to that. Even if a charge is reversed people can be left in the dust with fees as the bank/credit card company will say they are not responsible and the merchant will try and say the same thing. I almost feel bad for the backlash that Dreamhost is going to face because of this, but not quite because of the way they treated us towards the end of our run with them.