Funfare for the Common Man

Arbitrary, apropos thoughts of various goings-on I’ve got a lot of things on my mind, and because I have neither the attention span or concentration needed to actually concentrate on just one thing, I thought I’d share a few rants or observations that have been swilling around in my head over the past days and weeks. Pedantic alert: Notice I didn’t say ‘random’ thoughts – it would be so easy to call it that, but that would be just plain wrong and misleading. These thoughts are far from random: they’ve been carefully mulled over and considered and I’ve deliberately chosen them to share. Okay, enough of the pedantry, let’s get started. After 5 weeks in America, I’ve now been back in Kyiv nearly a month. For what it’s worth. Despite teaching, it still feels a bit like a summer holiday. Maybe it’s because there are only a few teachers around and it’s quite chill and calm: it’s probably the only time of the year when we can focus on purely teaching and nothing else. It’s a ...

It’s beyond me how anyone can enjoy watching films dubbed or with voice-overs. It’s an absolute travesty, as far as I’m concerned. Whether you understand the language of the film or not, isn’t there something pleasant and endearing about watching a foreign film in its original language? Of course, I say this from the perspective of an English-speaker, so by foreign film I mean anything not originally in English. From the perspective of a non-native speaker, I don’t know if The Dark Knight or the Avengers constitute ‘foreign’ films (I would say no), but let’s just say any film in a language not your own for the purposes of this little rant. The other day I went to a local cinema – Zhovten for my local readers – which sometimes shows films in the original language. We were there to see ‘Future Shorts’, 6 short films totaling 81 minutes, from 6 different countries: Poland, Brazil, South Korea, Denmark/Sweden (1 film) and 2 from America. It was advertised as being in the original l...