Drama, Movies

Notes on a Scandal

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Don’t! Stop! Don’t! Stop! Don’t… Don’t stop! I thought that Notes on a Scandal was a film about one of these notorious conservative British politicians caught up in a sex scandal. Wrong! The scandal involves people from a very different social group. Not knowing anything about the plot made the film all the image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

The Last King of Scotland

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If I could decide the Oscars all by myself, the King (Forest Whitaker) and the Queen (Helen Mirren) would receive the 2007 Oscars for best actor. The two roles could not be more different. But Whitaker and Mirren individually deliver one of the best performances in the history of cinema portraying a real human image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

Little Children

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Sarah (Kate Winslet) and Brad (Patrick Wilson) meet on a playground in a suburb of Boston just as their marriage is entering a difficult period. They feel an immediate attraction. Little Children chronicles how people who are stuck in a staid, lifeless marriage struggle when they develop extra-marital romantic feelings, unexpectedly standing before a temptation image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

Babel

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With Babel Alejandro González Iñárritu has established himself in my eyes as one of the most innovative filmmakers of our times. For Iñárritu and his longtime writing partner, Guillermo Arriaga, life is not a cakewalk. The basic sensibility running through Love is a Bitch, 21 Gramms and now Babel is deep pessimism: at any moment image [Read More]
Documentary, Movies

When the Levees Broke

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Spike Lee is no Ken Burns. His “documentary” about the human tragedy that unfolded during and after the Hurricane “Katrina” hit the Gulf Coast is not unfair but unbalanced. Lee’s cause is noble one. He wants to draw attention to the suffering experienced by the residents of New Orleans even a year after the catastrophe. image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

The Queen

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The trailer for The Queen turned me off, but friends and critics insisted that I watch The Queen. “It is a really great movie,” the said. The first scene already felt much less staged and invented than the dialogue between Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth featured in the trailer. The film is not great. What image [Read More]
Documentary, Movies

Supersize Me!

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In the tradition of pre-modern pharmacists who would test remedies on their own body, Morgan Spurlock decides to eat at McDonalds three times a day for a month and let a battery of doctors keep track of how his body would react to such a diet. I knew that McDonald’s was not good for you: image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

Casino Royale

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My teenage self loved James Bond. Part of becoming an adult was letting go of 007. I remember walking out of a movie theatre in the early 1990s, saying to myself. “Bond has lost any resemblance to a real human being. This cartoon-like character is just plain old silly. I am never going to watch image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

The Passion of the Christ

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The Passion of the Christ should more appropriately be called Mel Gibson’s Passion for Violence. Anyone who sets out to make a movie about the last 12 hours of Jesus’ life has the artistic responsibility to provide a context of what Jesus was all about. Mel Gibson message is that Jesus died the most brutal image [Read More]
Comedy, Movies

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

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Remember the six months before American troops invaded Iraq. The French and German secret services were claiming that no credible evidence existed to show that Saddam was close to producing nuclear weapons. Colin Powel, in what became a reputation destroying speech at the UN, claimed that the U.S. had precisely this smoking-gun kind of evidence.  image [Read More]