Little Romance 1979

A Romeo and Juliet theme without tragic ending however. It is an award winning movie. Two 13 year old Daniel and Lauren meet, develop a system to beat horse races and have an adventure travel to Venice. both Daniel and Lauren discuss Heidegger. There is also a data science episode (how to predict the outcomes of horse races). Laurence Olivier (known especially from Hitchcock's Rebecca" plays the helpful "Julius". The story is based on the 1977 novel "E=mc2 Mon Amour. Critiques obviously did not like it: one reviewer "gives us two movie kids in a story so unlikely I assume it was intended as a fantasy. And it gives us dialog and situations so relentlessly cute we want to squirm." Well, the same could have been said about Shakespear's Remeo and Juliet. Maybe also because the movie suggests that kids can have brains. If I may add a personal remark: Heidegger is much more ludicrous in my opinion than this romance. Heidegger's rants can be summarized with Shakespear as: "To be or not to be, that is the question". I myself had been interested in ontology as a teenager too (but not as young as in the movie, it was when I was 16), but then asked myself after reading it: "What did I actually learn?" The answer was "Nothing". I got then more interested in math, where one can learn more than in existentialism. (Here is an English translation of The introduction to Metaphysics by Heidegger [PDF] which Lauren reads secretly in the story. Judge yourself. )



MOV, Ogg Webm. IMDB link
Oliver Knill, Posted October 10, 2023,