![]() Their identities have been swiped from their brains in a very Eternal Sunshine fashion-not because they were hoping to escape some sort of heartbreak, however, but because they are trying to escape violence in their past. ![]() ![]() The title refers to a remote, off the grid town in the middle of Texas-a place named Caesura, a small village the locals call "the Blinds." No one is really a local, per se everyone who lives in Caesura came there from someplace else, although their origins are unknown. Reading The Blinds, however, snapped me out of it even as it provided a satisfying escape. And I’ve often thought, "It would be really nice to get away from everything, disconnect from the world, live a quiet life in the middle of nowhere, and forget about it all." ![]() I have yelled at my television and deleted social media apps from my phone. I have to admit something: Several times in the last few months I’ve wanted to snap my laptop shut and throw it across a room. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() His Assyrian background is a point of contention, and his name is reviled as being “odious” and “a name that does not inspire confidence.” He is only referred to as “Yo-Yo” toward the end of the book, by young new tent mates whom he doesn’t like. The book: Yossarian’s name makes him stand out from his peers with their more American-sounding surnames. The structural changes downplay the purposeful chaos of the book’s organization, and mean the series is populated with fewer of the incessant, obvious contradictions that define the experience of reading Heller’s novel. Flashbacks are excised, and the story rearranges some key events to create an arc of Yossarian’s spirit being progressively broken, and adds a completely different ending. The miniseries: The series is told mostly chronologically, though it does start with a traumatic event (Snowden’s death) that is finally referenced in the sixth and final episode of the miniseries. This non-chronological storytelling puts the focus on the emotional arc that takes Yossarian from the first time we see him in a hospital through his final flight to Sweden. The turmoil of memory often dictates when sequences are referenced, with one incident suddenly leading to the telling of another in the past. The book: Heller’s arrangement of the events that befall central soldier Yossarian does not lend itself to a tidy sequential narrative rather, it comprises certain episodes, like Snowden’s death, that are referred back to and later elaborated on. ![]() ![]() ![]() In fact, the effort he puts into holding the screen feels born of a desire to counterbalance that, as though viewers would be in danger of drifting away were he not calling attention to the magic of performance. He’s not one of those mysterious few anointed with the innately watchable quality we call movie stardom. To watch him is to be made aware of how difficult it can be, of how active the choices he’s making are - the tilt of a head, the narrowing of an eye, the tenor of a voice. Edward Norton has never been one of them. Some people make acting look easy, vanishing into roles in ways that render all decisions about timing and technique invisible. Edward Norton and Willem Dafoe in Motherless Brooklyn. ![]() |