Comedy, Movies

The Proposal

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The Proposal is a lot better than I had expected after seeing the trailer for it. The short preview made it look like a silly film with a lame plot and stale humor. The heroine (Sandra Bullock) starts out a bitch. She is the chief editor of a distinguished book publisher in New York City. image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

Cloud 9 (Wolke 9)

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The idea of making a film about sexual desires of seniors is brilliant. Such a film was overdue. But Andreas Dresen, the 46-year-old director of Cloud 9 constructed a film about his own desires rather than exploring how seniors cope with society’s predilection to see them as sexless creatures. Dresen’s drama is not about the image [Read More]
Documentary, Movies

The Times of Harvey Milk

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This documentary about the life of Harvey Milk starts at the moment of his election to the city council of San Francisco. Compared the recent motion picture Milk, the film begins a bit slow but then becomes a wonderful depiction of what made Milk a great politician. It is quite remarkable to see him organize image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

Gran Torino

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Clint Eastwood is now 78 years old.  He has directed 29 movies. Some of them are very good (e.g. Letters from Iwo Jima) some of the very bad (e.g. Bridges of Madison County). He works quickly. Yet in contrast to Woody Allen who also makes one film a year, Eastwood is not repeating himself. The image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

Milk

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Sean Penn is perhaps my favorite living male actor. I see films merely because he is in them. Milk, the interesting real life story of the first openly gay public official in the United States proved that even the most talented actor cannot portray every character.  Despite all of his amazing talents, the task of image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

The Baader Meinhoff Complex

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In 1997, Heinrich Breloer made a spectacular docudrama (a documentary interspersed with acted drama) about the abduction of Hans Martin Schleyer, the head of the West German employer’s union, by the Red Army Fraction, a home-grown terrorist group, formed by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff.  The Baader Meinhoff Complex goes all the way to image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

Angels and Demons

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The opening scene at the CERN physics laboratory where an experiment to create anti-matter (The God particle) takes place is visually stunning. Rome and its Catholic rituals provide a beautiful backdrop for the film. The next two hours, however, are a wild car chase through Rome that I found pretty annoying after a while. The image [Read More]