Unlocking the Mind and The Great Escape

It was snowing in Pitcaple this afternoon and in fact it's still chucking it down big time. The white stuff has returned with a vengeance. Fortunatly I am well stocked up with pies and cat food.
All day the TV news has been advising drivers to avoid non essential trips. Mind you they sent some reporters out in 4x4's to "see how far they could get" which sounds fairly non essential if you think about it.
That aside it gave me time to chill out and watch a film. I chose "The Man Who Wasn't There".
It's a 2001 neo-noir film written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.
It's about a barber.
If you need a plot summary there's quite a good one on Wikipedia.
Though a black and white film, "The Man Who Wasn't There" was shot in colour and transferred to black and white. Some prints were however accidentally released with the first couple of reels in colour. It's nicely shot and the plot is superbly flat.
Folk such as Big Dave die, other folk lie, some cut hair and at near the end there are flying saucers. It's a bit like life really.
The central theme of the film is that when you look too hard at situations they become complicated and hard to understand.
Reminds me somehow of Andy Warhol's work.
We all know and love or hate the "Campbell's Soup" prints but, in my opinion, Warhol's films are still quite challenging despite the lack of any obvious plot.
One of his most famous films, "Sleep", features poet John Giorno sleeping for six hours. The 35 minute film "Blow Job" is one continuous shot of the face of DeVeren Bookwalter receiving oral sex from filmmaker Willard Maas, although the camera never tilts down to see this. Another, "Empire", consists of eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building in New York City at dusk. Then there is the film "Eat" which consists of a man eating a mushroom for 45 minutes.

This is a shot of the lock on my back door. Simple in the extreme although you could write a book about it. Who made it, how it was made, when it was made, who has locked and unlocked it over the last 70 years or so .....

In the morning, if the blizzard persists I intend to watch "The Great Escape" for the 34th time just in case I missed anything. I first saw it aged 12 with my Aunty Isobel from Inverurie. She fancied Steve McQueen something rotten.
But that's another story.