Shanghai Triad was a nice movie, though I wouldn't say it was a good movie. Partially on principle in fact, because I find Zhang Yimou's movies to be ridiculously overrated in the west. I think Gong Li is horribly miscast (her role should have been played by someone a bit more lithe), and on the whole I think the film has some messy storytelling, but it does some really nice work with the conventions of the gangster genre.

Two things in particular stand out in the film, one is the use of the theme of the conspiracy that the intended victim is using to his advantage, the second is some of the mother/son themes the work their way into this an other gangster films.

There is not much to be said about the scheme that is used against you plot, other than its a rather charming plot that is used most effectively in gangster films. The point of the plot being somewhere between "you're damned if you do, damned if you don't," and "you can't fight the wrath of God." If one takes the religious dimension of this plot at full face value (which I'm not suggesting that you do, but I have the impression that Borges was playing with it in the several detective stories he wrote around this plot structure) then the gangster form of the plot would have something of a devilish turn to it.

I have a deep sympathy for damned if you do damned if you don't plots, a sympathy that I never quite understood the reason for. The fatalistic plot is as old as Greek tragedy, and there is a seemingly insensible turn of logic in these stories that makes the glory of man his struggle to overcome his own insignificance. People in these gangster plots are going to their death as a moral imperative, which is a strangely beautiful concept. (This might be worth comparing to Blade Runner).

The kind of Public Enemyesque oedipal story I find rather interesting in this film. The boy's "father" is of course evil, and willing to kill him. His "mother" is a risque woman, which is nice. Whats good about that bit of the story is that the morality of both the man and the woman's position are outside of consideration. The reason why the boy sympathizes with the "mother" as opposed to the "father" is that he sees her out of context (or in the context of her actual life, as opposed to her active life), whereas the father is always rather shadowy. So the value judgment here is that the woman is a living thing whereas the gangster is a force. Action, forces that push you forward, always seem to push the boy a little closer to the grave.

I saw Buttoners about 8 years ago, at the Cinequest film festival. I originally was not that impressed by it, only thinking it was one of many films at that film festival which was entertaining, with a few memorable scenes, but not much worthy of remembering. The film came up in conversation though with my lovely Czech girlfriend, and what should I discover but that it is one of the most often quoted Czech films of the past 10 years.


The specific quote that one hears in pubs all over the Czech Republic is "Neřeš, nepřepínej!", translating to "don't try to solve any problems, and just don't change the channels." A lovely quote if I ever heard one. She says there are other quotes from this film floating around the Czech lands, but that's the most used one.

I'm more than willing to credit my dismissal of this film to my lack of a general appreciation of film as a medium, which is something I largely developed over the past six years. The two things I remember most enjoying of this film is the beginning where Japanese people are using American swear words in order to make themselves feel better, and the end of a film where the ghost of an American world war II pilot is trying to come to terms with the fact that he dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

This last scene has particular resonance. Only the dead can have sympathy for the dead.

Infernal Affairs is among the best action films I have ever seen, and quite definitely the only Buddhist action film I've seen. The plot, despite having comic book tinges and bad metaphors, develops logically from the youthful beginnings of a story, to a perfect tragic ending.

The plot is a generic "cops vs. thugs" plot, with the twist that the thugs have a spy in with the cops, and the cops have a spy in with the thugs.

The plot would be rather dry if it wasn't for the fact that the "cops vs. thugs" plot is a "macguffin" for a secondary plot about the thug spy trying to go legit. In the end he is unable to and is responsible for the death of the hero of the film, the under-cover cop. The film concludes with a line from a Buddhist sutra about the hell in which one begs for death, but death never comes.

I feel there is little to add to that plot which is so strikingly tragic, unfortunately the film was remade by Scorcese, who completely botched the job (I don't know what led him to think an American could remake a Buddhist action film, without the Buddhist), and Infernal Affairs III really botched the job by punishing the man who's punishment is not dying.

This film should have been left alone. It only causes further suffering to drag people out of their own private hells and expose them to the daylight.

Y Tu Mama Tambien is a beautiful film, and honestly one that I am still puzzling over. In order to facilitate that puzzling I'm going to give away the surprise ending, and its enough of a surprise ending that one shouldn't continue reading unless you've seen the movie (which you should do... unless you are against sex).



I am eager to read this film as a "what would you do if you knew you were going to die" story, which could lead me to a lot of nice places. I am particularly interested in what draws the men and woman of this story together (speaking sexually of course), and I find it quite nice that the woman finds having sex with two young men to be more "real" then spending the time with her husband. Whether or not the film is, in total, an existentialist story, its answer to the existentialist dilemma is a rather interesting one.

I say that, because the film begs the question, what exactly is more "real," about these two boys than her husband. Though the director is obviously signaling this at certain points (she is going to tell her husband she is dying, he interrupts her and tells her he cheated on her), ignoring those obvious "he's a bastard" markers (which are always rather shallow, no one can be as big a bastard in real life as men in film have to be), the film wants to signify less blatantly that the careless sexual relationship has something of the religious in it, that cannot be properly encompassed by a socialized relationship.

Though I mean no disrespect to the religious people who are reading my blog, the concept of an "afterlife," typically considered, somewhat cheapens the idea of life in general. The woman in the film, and thus the film in general since the story is completely sympathetic to her, aims to experience life as bodily as possible, and thus as physically as possible. She attempts to experience beauty (sex with rather attractive young men) in the context of its constant erasure (death).

In this reading the message would be wholly pagan, and at the same time tragic (in the sense of Greek tragedy), because life is constantly being measured by the end annulment of its value.

In the Greek tragedy though there is always the prospect of history remembering you, and really, the truest tragedy is the memory of a person's disappearance to time. The boys do not learn any lessons from the woman, and the hedonism of the two weeks with all the accompanying "magical realism" is a matter for shame between the two of them. The only thing that remains of the woman is a mystery about what she was trying to say, like a ghost signaling without being heard.

I believe there might be a political message to the film as well, though I don't know what it is.

There is a lot in Eros + Massacre that I think is ideal cinema, though it does not seem to be able to decide whether it is a slow art house movie, a crazy surreal art house movie, or soft core porn, I think that's absolutely charming. Perhaps I should explain the "plot."

The movie is centered on the the life story of an actual Japanese anarchist that lived around the turn of the century (19th to 20th). It is intercut with the "story" of 2 college age kids in late 60's Japan. The anarchist talks a lot about annoying social theory, which allows him to get away with having a wife and two girlfriends and telling them that everyone is "free." He also is dependent on one of the girlfriends for money, but they're all radical feminist/anarchists, so they only kinda mind. In the end though, he decides to run off with the girlfriend who doesn't pay for his living, the other girlfriend finds them, and then there's a long scene where he gets killed or not killed by different women several times. Earlier in the movie you see him getting assassinated by government goons, which is how the guy (and his girlfriend) died in real life.

This is cross-cut with a guy and a girl acting crazy. The 60's in Japan were generally a crazy time, and universities were always getting attacked by riot squads with gas bombs (my Japanese teacher was in the middle of one of these), and people kept on joining radical organization, and so on and so forth. These kids are caricatures of Japanese students at the time, the girl seems to prostitute herself from time to time (it was a general policy in Japanese film studios at this time to never make a movie without a lot of nudity in it), and the guy is always around her, even while she's having sex with other men, the other men don't seem to mind though. Most of the time though, the two of them are running and screaming, and discussing the life of this anarchist, and various things that sound like social theory but probably aren't.

So, if I explained this film well enough (which I probably didn't), you'll notice that its a rather surrealistic celebration of anarchy, included with lots of boring discussions about anarchy. A somewhat appropriate film for the time when the Japanese New Wave was interacting with pink films (my favorite other example of this is Branded to Kill), not to mention a wonderful title.

But was sex and nonsense a recipe for success? Quite simply, the film disrupts our understanding of how a "story" works. The plot is really centered around two individuals discussing how a real life story "should" have happened, and because of cinema it did happen, in a strange acted way. The death of all these anarchists happened half a dozen times, but they never actually happened in the movie. All of the characters can become disconnected from time, and all the characters can freely disconnect themselves from common social mechanisms. The characters are in themselves just "ideas," trying to present a vision of freedom in a "free" space (cinema). The freedom they are desiring is largely a sexual one, but in the widest possible sense, in the surrealist sense where desire is a logic that is above the logic of perception (think Dali). The only way they can do that is by living in the world of film, where secondary logical patterns are quite often substitutable for primary logical patterns.

Of course the 60's showed us that film and real life aren't necessarily that far apart.

I plan on writing a post this weekend about my secret affection for soft core porn, look forward to it.

While I will admit on the whole, that I enjoyed the playfulness of A Zed & Two Noughts, I object to Peter Greenaway's work on the whole (or the two films of his I've seen). I'll describe my some reasonable and some unreason reasons for my mixed feelings about this film, and let the reader decide.

The first thing that really got me against Peter Greenaway, was that I thought that The Pillow Book, was essentially about how Greenaway wanted to have sex with a Japanese woman, but I'll leave that for another review. The second thing I dislike about Greenaway is the fact that he is one of the favorite directors of Res magazine. I met their founder once, and have held a high distaste for the magazine ever since, and everything that constitutes "digital culture," (including blogs). The third reason is that I find a fixation on "kinky sex" rather annoying, and Greenaway doesn't seem to make movies on anything else.

On the other hand I find obsessions with death, and strange music rather nice.

The plot revolves around two twins, who work at a zoo studying the decomposition of animals. They are both in love with a woman who loses both of her legs in (different) accidents, the first one involving a swan. There is a woman who works at the zoo, that is particularly mean and has a "thing" for animals. In the end (I'll give it away) the twins discover they used to be attached, decide to sow themselves back together, commit suicide, and record themselves decompose on a time lapse film. All the characters particularly liked the song "The Teddybear's picnic."

There were some other little bits of the story, but I think you can get the point.

What I particularly like about the story is the concept of scientifically studying something with absolutely no scientific meaning (studying the decomposition of flesh as a way to know the difference between life and death). The main characters are concerned with something that I think most people should be concerned about - the abstractness of death. Also, the main characters were concerned with the subject in the way that one should be concerned with such a subject - abstractly. In that way "The Teddy Bear's picnic," was really the perfect song for this film.

But the amputee sex and bestiality was all a bit silly.

Three to a Match is a delightful pre-code comedy that, in my humble opinion, is one of the most damning critiques of sexual morality that I have ever seen.

I am probably exaggerating, but I am comfortable making such a bold statement, because I generally don't think to highly of "critiques of sexual morality." Such films fall largely into two groups - the attempts of filmmakers who wish they had lived through the sixties to use the "sexual revolution" to justify the production of films bordering on pornography, and the attempt by filmmakers who read to much 70s structuralist theory to break down the scopophilic desire inherent in the filmic medium to free women from the horrible fate of being desired by men (used for masturbation of a different sort). This film does something wholly different, it defends sexual morality as the best way to lead to a boring life, and gives a rather beautiful portrayal of feminine desire leading to death.

The plot goes as so: Three girls graduate from middle school, one is really rich and goes to an expensive prep school, one is really smart and goes to a training school for secretary work, and one is really popular with boys, and in the course of time goes to a correctional institution. They meet up later, by accident, and the rich girl has married a rich man and is taking care of a small child, the smart girl has been doing secretarial work, and the girl from the correctional institution is now reformed. But then everything takes a turn. The rich girl is board with her life, and her always nice and accommodating (though overworked and effeminate) husband allows her to go on a trip to Europe alone with their kid. While on the trip she sleeps with a young good looking, masculine guy, and from then on she seems to do nothing besides drink and have sex. The other two girls find her one day, and discover the kid horribly neglected, they tell the father, who comes and takes the kid away, and invites the two girls to move in with him, one as the kids nanny (the smart girl) and one as his wife (the correctional institute girl). The rich girl dies.

About 90 percent of all movies that contain some reference to female sexuality, female sexuality is a commodity. It is something a man has to "get." Up until the 1950's female sexuality was obtained through marriage, after the 1950's largely through charm. Even today, if you read any of those books like Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus, you'll find that the concept that women have sexual desire is somewhat controversial. Though now it is termed somewhat differently then the days when we lived with the delusion that men desire women, and women desire marriage. Anything that tries to convince you that female desire is fundamentally different from male desire is essentially saying when you get down to it that men desire women, and women desire marriage.

This idea that "men desire women, and women desire marriage," goes out of fashion every now and then, and is replaced by another fiction, that female desire and male desire are almost the same except that female sexuality is much stronger. This is by and large the position taken by most sex comedies made in the 20s (Clara Bow) and early 30s (all pre-code sex comdies), until it was more or less explicitly banned by the production code and never really came back in the United States (it is something of a cliché in British comedies).

While I would never argue that this second fiction is "right," I would quite definitely argue that it is the more progressive view of sexuality, as can be clearly seen in this film (or most any Clara Bow film). While the film ostensibly punishes her "wild sexuality," it treats both her and her friend's sexuality rather lovingly. The scene where the rich girl and school dorm mates are reading romance novels together is positively lovely, and the scenes of the girls in the correctional institution are similarly fond of its subjects. You cannot help but identify with the girls in every one of their interactions with men, and of course, the one who was boy-crazy in the beginning ends up with the rich guy in the end.

Of course reading the moral leanings of each individual event, and the juxtaposition of those events, would be a tiring affair and not to the point. The point is that it is no accident that the last 'gag' of the film rings somewhat bitterly, because despite being ostensibly a moral tale about the dangers of uncontrolled sex, the way the film is structured the "morality of sex" is never part of the equation. The female desire of men is the one unqualified good in this film, it is the one place where there is the opportunity for hope, for life, everything else in the film is being judged for its inability to provide a location for this type of interaction to flourish. Not only the women, not only the men, not only the correctional institution, work, alcohol and children; the entire world is being judged, because it fails to make room for something beautiful.

More than one person dies at the end of this film.

Buy Three on a Match on video here

Triumph of the Will, is a well made and beautiful movie, that is hard to watch without lowering ones impression of the human race in general.

It was one of Hitler's favorite movies.

The film, made of the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremburg, was made by one of the most brilliant lady filmmakers in history. It is a documentary in the old documentary tradition (a collection of juxtaposed shots used to invoke a mood rather than explain a situation). The general way the film works is it juxtaposes, shots of crowns, shots of smiling beautiful women, shots of children, shots of men "doing their duty," shots of Hitler looking friendly, more shots of beautiful women.

The entire thing is gorgeously shot, but it is impossible to watch without a shudder. Not because Hitler is so evil, but because it is easy to understand in this movie why everyone loved him. The film really shows you everything that humans are proud of in society, a commitment to work, caring for children, beautiful men and women, a nice combination of strength and affection, which is what being a community is really about. The film shows you how Hitler really stood for this 'community' of the German people, just as any other politician does for their particular constituancy.

Of course watching it today, it serves as a reminder of just how easily humans can be led to murder.

Those of you out there who are inclined to synthesize information, may read the bizarre number of posts where I try to tie issues like love, death, religion, and surrealism, into a single movie that's ostensibly about cops, robbers, or spaceships, and think that I can read these four subjects into anything. Of course some others might glance at the database nature of this site, and come to the conclusion I'm not one who is inclined to synthesize information.

I mention this now, because Jesus' Son is another movie that I enthusiastically enjoy because of its ability to combine death, love, and certain surreal moments, with an overwhelming religious tone. Though there are differences between this movie and other movies I have noted thus far, I would classify the films as part of the same general "conversation."

The film is based on a series of short-stories by Denis Johnson centered on this rather lost young man. The film ads a rather lost young woman to the mix, and ties the stories together with an overarching redemption narrative. This later little bit is what I find most distasteful about the film, because redemption narratives on the whole are distasteful, but we don't really need to dwell on it, since I didn't realize the redemption narrative was there until around the fourth time watching the film. The rest of the film is far too charming to notice anything like a defective plot. (I should note, that this leads me to conclude that the collection of short stories might be the perfect adaptation material for a film).

The plot, as I mentioned, essentially circles around a lost young man, and his girlfriend who gets him addicted to heroin. The young man is called FH by most everyone, which stands for F#$khead, he also has a strangely in depth knowledge of theology. The woman is a heroin addict, and that's about it.

The reason why I don't classify this film as being about love, is that the female character is not really a character, she's a metaphor for something. In the film she really serves as a focal point for the main character's overwhelming passion for everything worldly and dying (the same thing...). Everything she does in the film is physical, dancing, ripping his clothes off, doing heroin, punching him (it helps considerably that Samantha Morton is a wonderful physical actress who can't deliver lines worth a damn). One of the most telling scenes is when he hallucinates her into a drive in movie (in Carnival of Souls to be specific), her actions are like lights projected, which he is simply happy to watch.

She dies of course, as things have a tendency to do. A lot of things in this movie to be exact, at least 3 humans, and a whole lot of baby rabbits. The attitude towards death in this movie is summarized by a minor character later in the film who the main character has a relationship with. Every one of her husbands, every person she has ever loved, has died in some sort of strange situation, from this she has come to see herself as lucky to be alive, and to value every moment of life. When she is having sex she raises her hands to the heavens as though she is in church.

The "value" of life is further brought home by the strange and beautiful moments that are scattered throughout the film: The flying naked woman, the man who comes into the hospital with a knife in his eye, the hallucinations at the drive in movie, seeing Jesus' heart inside a drug dealer, the interactions with the Mennonites, and ultimately the young man's total absorption with his girlfriend.

The relationship in the end though is not about love, and this film is not about redemption, or heroin. It is about the awe which one should have for the strange beauty of life.

Buy Jesus' Son the Book

Buy Jesus' Son the Movie

Solaris is known for being the least 'artsy' of Tarkovsky's films, and because of that I've had to argue with many people that the film shouldn't be under-estimated.

While the film is based on a novel, I find it hard to see, from watching the film, how it could have been written as a novel. The film plays with questions about a person's knowledge of their lover, questions about eternal life, and issues of presence and absence, but it plays with all of these issues in a way that constantly returns to the issue of cinema.

The plot, in the simplest form, involves a psychologist who goes to a space station to investigate strange things happening on board. The station orbits a planet which is supposed to be alive and has strange powers. After spending some time on the station he discovers his dead wife living in his room. The other people on the station explain that the planet can create individuals based on the person's memory of them, though these individuals are only manifestations from memory, and not the actual person. The man has a hard time dealing with this woman who is his wife, but is not really his wife, the woman asks the other scientists to destroy her (she cannot commit suicide) so she does not hurt him anymore.

The reason why I have a hard time imagining this in book form (I would like to read the book soon), is because the physical existence of the woman is so deeply accentuated in the film, that it is hard to dismiss her as an idea, a delusion if you will. The film is constant emphasizing that she is there, and that she has form (not to mention that she is beautiful). She feels the effects of gravity, she goes into spasms of pain. Yet in the beginning she appears out of nowhere.

The idea I think intersects with the description of the afterlife in the first episode of The Decalogue, where the Father tells his son that after someone dies the memories are important "that they smiled a lot, that a tooth is missing." After someone dies they go from being an individual with the possibility to possibility to inspire love, or anger, or to act upon a situation. When you are dead you are nothing but an idea, what the Decalogue says is that the afterlife is really the idea of your living potential. It is the longing memory of something magical that no longer is, something living, breathing, and trembling.

In Solaris the 'no longer exists' exists again. The idea of a person returns to the full potentiality of that person in a physical form. Not only does she again have the potential to inspire feelings, but she has the full physicality of life, with all the suffering and beauty it implies... the psychologist in his state of breakdown discusses the possibility that humans cannot accept God's miracles.

I could not really tell you how to answer all the questions this film brings up. Whether or not the idea of a person is the same as a person except for the lack of potential. No one could tell you the full value of physicality (except maybe Heidegger). But what affirms in a way that seems to have to me the force of a logical arguement is that the true self is not a set of emotions or attitudes, that the soul and the body are in essence one thing, and neither can be judged as good or evil.

There are only two things that this movie finds it possible to judge, life, which is full of the wonder of beauty and possibility, and death, which is only the horror of silence.

The movie is beautiful, you should buy Solaris here

One of the great things about all of the Universal Horror films (or essentially all the horror films made before Hitchcock popularized surprise effects), is the way they manage to combine really superb conceptual work with a complete disregard for anything resembling a coherent style. While Dracula and Frankenstein are much more stylistically intense film, conceptually nothing can surpass The Mummy.

(I should note at this point that the film was directed by Karl Freund, who is known to be one of the best cinematographers ever. Leave it to be said though that I don't remember the style as much as I remember the conceptual work.)

The film centers on one of those strikingly good looking Eastern European actresses who seemed to have flocked over to America around this time just to enliven Hollywood productions. In this film she is a lovely English woman with a tendency to wear thick eyeliner. Two men are in love with her, some haughty Englishman, whose father is the archaeologist that uncovered the Mummy's tomb, and the Mummy himself, who was mysteriously brought to life several years earlier. The woman it seems is a reincarnation of the Mummy's ancient love, and he desires to have her back.

Both men face hurdles in their desire to obtain the woman, the Englishman because he is a pompous asshole who is continually proposing sex to her (yay pre-code movies!), and the Mummy because in order to have her he must first kill her. She eventually chooses the Englishman, and we are all disappointed (unless she is still possessed by the princess!!!).

The mummy of course is secretly the good guy in the film. He has been in love with a woman for over 2000 years, and the young Englishman is only interested in a quick screw, but because the poor mummy is 'living impaired,' he has to kill the woman to really be with her, and of course the woman doesn't really love him that much, and would much rather have a toss in the hay with the British guy then eternal love after death.

There are so many ideas running around in that plot that I really don't know where to start. The first noticable thing is the direct connection between death and love, which can be turned wildeian without much of a stretch (' Yet each man kills the thing he loves/By each let this be heard,/Some do it with a bitter look,/Some with a flattering word,/The coward does it with a kiss,/The brave man with a sword!). The idea of death as a marital consumation has been around for a long time, and it can be seen in Double Suicide, and In the Realm of the Senses (I know I chose two Japanese films, just a coincidence).

When the love-death proposal is rejected then the woman is instead given the opportunity of life-sex. A juxtaposition that really would not have been allowed in a film between 1934 and 1960. It is a pleasent juxtaposition too, the idea that the sex act really proves that we are still alive, and that we need to somehow prove that we still exist before our flesh begins to rot in the grave endlessly.

I like this movie, its fun to watch, and it is really about how love consumes you.

Buy the Mummy here

Like most ten part mini-series', some segments of the Decalogue are better than others. I find the fifth gets gets much more praise then it deserves because it has "a point" (thou shalt not kill), and I think "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is wholly mediocre. Ten is amazing (thou shalt not covet thy neighbors goods), but there isn't much to talk about in it... it is about stamp collecting though, which is a reason to see the episode in itself.

The two episodes that really blow my hair back are the first (thou shalt have no god but me), and the sixth (thou shalt not covet thy neighbors wife), both of these episodes are discourses on vision and its relationship to human life.

The answer that the father in the first episode gives to his son's "what is death/what is left of people after we die" question, is really quite interesting. The Dad says that the memory is important, and then goes on to describe a number of noticable physical features about people (they smile a lot, a tooth is missing, etc.). The Father describes life after death as a film watched in people's memories.

This is followed by the boy looking at his father in parts. His father is teaching a class at a University, and the kid, standing behind something, adjusts himself so he can only see the fathers mouth, his eyes, his hands.

It is never fully stated that the boy dies, though we are nearly sure of it in the end. All that happens is that the boy goes from being visible to not being visible, a movement that is fully associated with the loss and the death of the boy. The boy, so to speak, is removed from the film, and from this we know he is dead.

There is a strange folding in of a reflexive idea in this episode. Memory(film) keeps you alive, but the removal from the film means death. Thus the boy is alive in the father's memory, but in the film he is dead. Perhaps we can say he is something other than physical, though still existant... after all there is a boy in the beginning of the second episode (in the church), who looks an awful lot like him (if anyone reads this and can confirm it is him, please tell me).

In the sixth episode a stalker decides he is in love with a woman by watching her. His love is completly absent from a desire to possess her though. He tells her that he does not want anything from her, or at least he does not know what he wants. The boy has simply become interested in watching her live her life, and find something strangely beautiful in it, that has gone far beyond his original sexual purpose.

She makes fun of him at first, but eventually changes her mind. She goes up to his room (after he has attempted suicide) and sees how he lives his life. In the scene where she is looking at the telescope he uses to look at her you can tell that she begins to understand that this is how a human lives his life, intertwined with hers. There is a connection based on a mutual knowledge of one another's privacy (a knowledge that is generally unaccessable except through peeping or through watching cinema).

There is a sense in this film that Kieslowski really belives cinema is a medium for transmitting love (as Bazin always liked to say). The episode though ends badly. With the two would-be lovers seperated by an emotional wall, and a glass with a circular hole framing the boy like a camera lens.

Buy The Decalogue