The Cinematic Films With the Least and the Most Dialog

There are a myriad of films which are famous in large part due to the cast speaking virtually no dialog at any point throughout the film’s runtime. In opposition to this, other films and film franchisees have become renowned for the inverse reason, dialog heavy films characterized by dense character exchanges and storylines driven by dynamic characters and expressive speech. In terms of films with casts who are rather quiet, All Is Lost created in 2013 with Robert Redford stranded at sea had a script that was a mere 31 pages in length with almost no spoken lines, WALL·E, a children’s animated film from 2008 featured 89 lines of dialog (51 by machines and 38 by humans) throughout the entirety of its screen time, 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, relied heavily upon silence to create dramatic tension, and finally Moebius, produced in 2013, contained no dialog whatsoever. In direct contrast to this and on the other side of that same spectrum, dialog heavy films exist in parallel, with the example of Casino, from 1995 which was extremely dialog heavy with a script of approximately 40,000 words, which is nearly double the average script length, with additional examples available as well (e.g. Dogma from 1999 with a 148 page script, A Few Good Men from 1992 with a 162 page script, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) from 1991 with a 183 page script etc.). This contrast demonstrates the principle that cinema can thrive in both environments of near silence with only body language, facial expressions, and set and character visuals to carry the story, as well as in rapid fire, constantly evolving, dialog heavy scenarios in which the script becomes the most important piece (or character) of the film

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Rigged Democracy

Boris Yeltsin, a progressive politician and the father of modern Russian democracy, resigned and abdicated his presidency to prime minister Vladimir Putin in 1999. Putin speaks fluent German and understands English. During late 2011, over 100,000 Russian citizens showed up in protest of Putin’s administration. This protest was the largest demonstration since the Democratic Revolution in August of 1991. Social media played a large role in this revolt by providing evidence of fraud via smartphone video. Evidence included ballot stuffing which involved ballet boxes being stuffed before the polls opened, ballets hidden in the bathrooms of the polling station, campaign officials filling out ballot forms fraudulently, and erasable ink being provided to voters so that campaign officials could erase and rewrite the submitted vote in favor of Putin. Were it not for compact smartphone video cameras and social media which allowed for the instantaneous uploading of captured footage, the chance of this information ever becoming public was slim at best as all evidence gathered was collected spontaneously before campaign officials had a chance to react and prevent further inquiry