Circle Calculator Thingy

It's not much, but it took me too freaking long to figure out. I feel slightly accomplished.

I stumbled upon this today and thought it was appropriate since Portal was just voted Game of the Year at the Game Developer's Conference. I think it deserved it.

One of the best documentaries I've seen in a long time, My Architect follows a son who is trying to understand who his father was. Nathaniel Kahn is the son of Louis Kan, an important architect who died in the 1970s. Nathaniel didn't spend a huge amount of time with his father, because his father was either traveling for his work or living with one of his other two families. Yes, his father seemed to have many relationships with women - not necessarily as a womanizer, but as a man who seemed to think loving a few different women was normal for his life. And it's not that Louis Kahn was an extremely attractive man; he had a scarred face from an accident in his childhood. He just attracted people to himself.

That's what's interesting about My Architect. While visiting the many buildings that his father designed, as well as interviewing the people who worked with him or loved him, Nathaniel learns that people seemed to be instinctively attracted to Louis Kahn's greatness. People knew that what he did was important. Though he died penniless, the people who knew him knew at the time that what he was working on wasn't just a bunch of buildings - they were masterpieces. As one fellow architect commented, he himself had built many buildings, but not masterpieces, and Louis Kahn had built a small amount, but left behind several masterpieces as his legend.

I found it really interesting to hear people's perspectives of Kahn. It's as if everyone forgave him for his unconventional lifestyle and work ethics, because they accepted that a genius doesn't live a normal life. They didn't expect him to live like everybody else. And, when you hear people describe his work, it's almost easy to agree with them. The conversations with various people touch on many different insights about architecture and art and what it does for the people who experience it. The trip to India, specifically, is where Nathaniel is best able to comprehend his father as an artist.

The is sometimes very emotional as well, especially when it comes to Nathaniel's exploration of his father as a lover and a parent. His mother claims that Louis was on the way to come and live with their family permanently when he died of a heart attack in a train station. Nathaniel interviews the women of Louis Kahn's life, and even their children, to try and discover if that was just his mother's wishful thinking, or if there might have been truth to it. I love the scene where the architect's various children discuss his funeral. They remember each other from the ceremony, including how Nathaniel and his mother were not acknowledged as family that day. While the past seems to have been filled with mixed families and emotions, there seems to be an element of acceptance that pervades all of the conversation, and to me, it seems to be that the acceptance stems from everyone's understanding of Kahn as a great artist.

This is definitely a movie I would watch again, because it's not just a documentary about a man's life - it's an exploration of the nature of art and its creators, and how we react to great pieces of art. With perfect balances of interviews, locations, photos, video, and the art itself, My Architect is not just an interesting documentary, but one extremely well-made.

I just read that David Fincher intends to direct the Neil Gaiman-penned screen adaptation of Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole.

Take a moment to wrap your head around all that.