Human Condition

"The Designated Mourner" is as demanding a movie-going experience as you're ever likely to have. Director David Hare, one of Britain's most celebrated playwrights, has brought Wallace Shawn's play, a London sensation last year, to the screen with the utmost rigor and simplicity. Mike Nichols, Miranda Richardson and David de Keyser, in re-creating their stage roles, are seated, a table in front of them, with a gold-leafed wall behind them.

It was a fine April day last week that found Elie Wiesel at Chapman University; it was a fine April day too, 58 years earlier, when the gaunt, teenage Wiesel found himself alive and suddenly free to walk out of the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the decades since, Wiesel's impassioned writing and speaking have won him a Nobel Peace Prize, and a large place in the public intellectual discourse about the Holocaust and the human condition. They have also brought him to Chapman each spring for the last three years as a distinguished presidential fellow, meeting with students and faculty to keep the significance of the Holocaust green in their minds.

The following are excerpts from Pope John Paul's latest encyclical, "Fides et Ratio" ("Faith and Reason"), a 150-page philosophical commentary on the human condition at the end of the millennium. * One of the most significant aspects of our current situation, it should be noted, is the "crisis of meaning." Perspectives on life and the world, often of a scientific temper, have so proliferated that we face an increasing fragmentation of knowledge.

Martin Scorsese is an Oscar-winning director, actor, producer, film historian and film preservationist. And now he can add lecturer to his resume. The director of such classics as "The Departed," 'Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull" and "GoodFellas" has been named the 42nd Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities. The annual lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is considered the most prestigious honor the federal government can bestow for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.

Masaki Kobayashi's near-10-hour, three-part "Human Condition" ("Ningen No Joken") trilogy is one of the monumental achievements in motion-picture history. It is also one of the most obscure, for the trilogy--"No Greater Love," "Road to Eternity" and "A Soldier's Prayer"--suffered from poor international distribution upon its completion in 1961. Having regained its rights to "The Human Condition," the venerable Shochiku Film Co. presented it at the old Kabuki Theater on Adams at Crenshaw in 1970.

The producer of the CBS Sunday movie "Picnic" intentionally decided not to remake the classic 1955 film starring William Holden and Kim Novak. "I saw the movie once years ago," says Blue Andre, who also serves as executive producer. "That movie was done." This movie, Andre says, went back to William Inge's 1953 Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Josh Brolin stars in the languid romance as Hal, a beefcake drifter who stirs up emotions when he arrives in the small Kansas town of Elgin.

In his subtle and superb "The Death of Mario Ricci" (at the Fox International for one week, starting today), film maker Claude Goretta finds in a small Swiss village the universe in microcosm.

DESOLATION A Novel by Yasmina Reza Alfred A. Knopf 144 pages, $19 * Yasmina Reza is best known in this country as the author of the Tony Award-winning play "Art." The Paris-based former actress is also the author of several other plays produced over the last decade or so, including "Conversations After a Burial," "Winter Crossing," "The Unexpected Man" and "Life x 3."

That voice. "It was gorgeous, luscious, rich and resonant," recalls Lillian Glass, describing the man at the other end of the line. They had never met face to face. "My mental image of him was that he was tall, maybe 6-foot-3, husky, well-built. A Pierce Brosnan type." And? "He was short, overweight and looked, uh, not like Pierce Brosnan," says Glass, who liked him anyway.

Hon, I'm zipping out to the video store. Back in a few." But in your dark heart, you know you don't need the video. Alone now, scarf on head, tote in hand, you're ready to commit the deed: Sneaking. You're sneaking out to indulge that part of yourself you hide from friends, family or neighbors because . . . because, well, you'd just die if they found out. Maybe you're sneaking out for a little after-dinner pint of Ben & Jerry's.

The Social Conquest of Earth Edward O. Wilson Liveright: 330 pp, $27.95 Edward O. Wilson is one of the great scientists of our time. The world's leading expert on ants and a consummate naturalist, he brilliantly compiles research data from a broad cross-section of fields to produce pictures of the innate complexity of life. He is also a renowned author. His more than 20 books have won two Pulitzer Prizes for their explanations of the lives of ants and exploration of human nature.

MARLOES SANDS, Wales - Nearly a hundred soldiers on horseback sprinted across the beach here last fall, dodging arrows and catapulted fire balls. Despite many casualties, the charging "Snow White and the Huntsman" army was determined to storm the castle of the evil Queen Ravenna, who not only can suck the beauty out of young women but also transmogrify into a murder of crows. Assessing the battle from an all-terrain vehicle was Rupert Sanders, a commercial director making his first feature film.

I was hoping for Bob Dylan. Briefly, on Wednesday afternoon, the singer was favored to win the Nobel Prize for literature by the British odds-maker Ladbrokes, which has handicapped the Nobels for many years. In second place was the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami; in third, the Syrian poet Adonis. Not that any of this matters; the Nobel committee is notoriously secretive and has tended, for much of the last decade anyway, to select laureates such as France's Jean-Marie Gustave le Clézio or Austria's Elfriede Jelinek, who are willfully outside the mainstream.

How Angelenos roll Re "Our way is the freeway," Opinion, July 11 Now that Gregory Rodriguez has romanticized the sense of "community" we all feel as we sit in traffic on the 405 breathing exhaust fumes — or rather, sitting with the windows rolled up glaring straight ahead — I am looking forward to his ode to some of the other pleasant things in life. Like, say, the olfactory delights of raw sewage or the wonderful camaraderie we have with our dentist during root canal surgery.

For years, the Humane Society of the United States and United Egg Producers have been adversaries over the treatment of the 280 million egg-laying hens in the U.S. As one might expect, the Humane Society has fought to protect hens from mistreatment — most live in cages so cramped they can't even spread their wings, and the air they breathe is suffused with ammonia created by their own excrement — while egg producers have argued against measures that...

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition Selected Essays and Reviews Geoff Dyer Graywolf: 422 pp., $18 paper "Almost as soon as I began writing for magazines and newspapers," Geoff Dyer tells us in the introduction to "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews," "I hoped one day to see my articles published in book form. " This is both obvious (what writer doesn't want to see his or her short pieces collected?) and revelatory. Such a collection is generally regarded as a sideline effort at best, and yet, the argument here goes, that's completely wrong.

Winning is all about self-gratification. It's the best feeling there is. It gives you a real high. . . . Losing is the worst. It makes you feel terrible, depressed and angry . I hate to lose. --Anne Schreick, 52, tournament bridge player Bodies bang and bounce in all directions on the parquet court. Sweat slops here and there, intensity and insults--cumulating like a thundercloud--hang thick in the air.

Worn red bricks, wire mesh, the dust of indifference and the grit of common cruelty are the foundations of a London housing project in the powerful "The Neighbour" at 24th Street Theatre. The Tuesday Laboratory's presentation of Meredith Oakes' drama has a hard-edged elegance as it explores the horrors of unneighborly neighbors. "When someone finds fault with me, it interrupts my inner life," James (Miles Eastman) opines--and his inner life is constantly interrupted.

The death of a child is every parent's worst nightmare. So when Nicole Kidman took on the role of a mother mourning the loss of her 4-year-old son in "Rabbit Hole" just a year after giving birth to a daughter in real life, she knew she was venturing into emotionally treacherous territory. "I had a conversation with my husband, because I needed him to understand that I've got to go exist in a limbo place for a while," the actress said. "It's a strange balancing act. " Yet during production, Kidman found her equilibrium faltering, unable to contain to the set the experience of her character's grief.

In a post-industrial future, humanity has been genetically altered to experience perpetual happiness and has been robbed of much of its language; one individual remarks, "What you cannot express in language does not exist in human minds. " This is the premise visionary writer-director Vladan Nikolic uses for his nightmarish "Zenith. " He drew inspiration from a series of experiments conducted by psychology professor Stanley Milgram that were designed to determine whether the participants would obey an authority figure who gave orders that directly conflicted with their consciences.