- GODOT QUOTES & DIRECTOR’S NOTES (bozolisand.com)
Who is Godot? What does he Mean? Is he supposed to be God? The magic words: Who Cares? Godot is what Alfred Hitchcock called the MacGuffin – a plot device about which the characters care desperately, but the audience isn’t meant to give a damn.
- The Hidden Fortress: Three Good Men and a Princess (criterion.com)
The Hidden Fortress was Akira Kurosawa’s first hit after 1954’s Seven Samurai, four years and four films earlier. It won even bigger at the box office and scooped up a handful of Japanese and international awards, proving that its director was not merely an art-house auteur but could fill theaters as well. The film’s popularity in Japan was instrumental in securing financial guarantees for Kurosawa’s own production company, which supported all his subsequent films up to 1970. The pacing and characters of The Hidden Fortress, its landscapes and epic feel, make it a great action film, and as Kurosawa’s first use of widescreen, it is one of his most stylish movies. With this film, the director’s artistry and humanist ideology spectacularly fused with the entertainment values of adventure films and comedies.
- Federal Security Service (Wikipedia)
The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB, ФСБ; Russian: Федеральная служба безопасности Российской Федерации, tr. Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii, IPA: [fʲɪdʲɪˈralʲnəjə ˈsluʐbə bʲɪzɐˈpasnəstʲɪ rɐˈsʲijskəj fʲɪdʲɪˈratsɨɪ]; ФСБ России) is the principal security agency of Russia and the main successor agency to the Soviet Union’s KGB; its immediate predecessor was the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK) which was reorganized into the FSB in 1995. The three major structural successor components of the former KGB that remain administratively independent of the FSB are the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the Federal Protective Service (FSO), and the Main Directorate of Special Programs of the President of the Russian Federation (GUSP).
- Waiting for Godot (Wikipedia)
Waiting for Godot (/ˈɡɒdoʊ/ GOD-oh) is a play by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives. Waiting for Godot is Beckett’s reworking of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled (in English only) “a tragicomedy in two acts”.