Drama, Movies

My Fair Lady

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George Cukor, the director of this extraordinarily fun film, admitted:  Give me a good script, and I’ll be a hundred times better as a director. My Fair Lady is based on the play Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts by the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw.  The writer won the Nobel Prize in literature (1925) image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

Madame Bovary

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Madame Bovary is a masterpiece. I mean both the BBC film adaptation of Flaubert’s famous novel as well as the story itself. First a few words about the film and then about the story. Especially in the first half, the director moves us quickly through the life of Emma Bovary. The 19th century setting is image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

Apocalypse Now (Redux)

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The first 10 minutes of Apocalypse Now are magnificent. My eyes were glued to every pixel on the screen. But following Captain Willard on his long journey from Saigon up a river to Cambodia where he is supposed to assassinate a U.S. general gone mad becomes tiring. The Redux version of the 1979 film image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

The Darjeling Limited

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This is Wes Anderson’s best film to date. It reaches the same depth of Rushmore, but instead of staying in the same Chicago suburb, the director takes us on a wonderful road trip to India. Unlike Life Aquatic, which also wanted to be an adventure film, The Darjeling Limited is never boring because even when image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

The Social Network

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When historians sit down to write the history of first decade of the 20th century, they would have likely used a few years ago labels such as the Rise of the Internet or Googlemania.  If Facebook continues to grow and add functions at its current pace (email will soon be integrated with its message image [Read More]
Comedy, Movies

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

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My Wes Anderson Film Festival continues. This week I screened his fourth film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). While Anderson pushes the cinematography onto a higher plane than in Rushmore or Bottle Rocket, the characters here feel more constructed and synthetic. Owen Wilson co-wrote the first two Anderson films. Perhaps he brought greater image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

Rushmore

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Wes Anderson’s 2nd film, released in 1998,  is an even bigger surprise than Bottle Rocket. The 15-year old hero, Max Fisher, loves his elite prep boarding school but he faces a pressing problem. Although he leads almost every extra-curricula club in the school and although he is a genius on many fronts, he is image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

Bottle Rocket

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A few months ago I read a story about the director Wes Anderson in the New Yorker. Anderson was hailed as an innovative filmmaker with a peculiar style. I had seen his The Royal Tenenbaums  when it came out and found the film different but not particularly compelling. It struck me as trying to take image image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

A Single Man

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If we don’t meet or if we lose the one person we are meant to be with, then our life is not worth living. Everything becomes meaningless. This is the key premise of the film. It is wrong. But if you suspend your critical faculties and assume this idea is correct for the duration image [Read More]