Posts Tagged ‘movies’
February 5th, 2012 | 
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My wife and I got a babysitter last Friday night so we could take the bus – MUCH easier than trying to find parking at the uptown UAlbany campus – and watch Slavery by Another Name, “a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans’ most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation.” Though the film will be premiering on PBS, Monday, February 13 at 9pm ET / 8pm CT (check local listings), the real draw of viewing it early on a bigger screen was to be able to see the director of the film, Shelia Curran Bernard, and the writer of the book upon which the film was based, Douglas Blackmon, who I had seen before.
Narrated by actor Laurence Fishburne, “The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: black culture, Black History Month, documentaries, Douglas Blackmon, movies, PBS, slavery, Slavery by Another Name, UAlbany | 
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I tend to think of movie years from Academy Awards night to Academy Awards night, not so much because I’m an Oscars fan – though I am – but because some of the movies that get nominated don’t even make it to small markets such as Albany, NY until January or even February. Yeah, I know the Oscar nominations were very conservative this year, for the most part.
*means I have actually seen it
Best Picture
*The Artist
*The Descendants
*Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
*Hugo
*Midnight in Paris
*The Help
Moneyball
War Horse
The Tree of Life
Saw 6 out of 9, so far, 3 in the last couple weeks. War Horse is still playing, so maybe I’ll still see it. I’d love to watch Moneyball, which is available on DVD.
WILL WIN: The Artist, which I liked. It’s a film about film. I mean, so is Hugo, but not as directly.
WANT TO WIN: Midnight in Paris, or The Descendants
PLEASE! NOT: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Best Actor
Demian Bichir, A Better Life
*George Clooney, The Descendants
*Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Brad Pitt, Moneyball
WANT TO WIN Read the rest of this entry »
While my wife was at a Tupperware party last weekend, I walked to the Madison Theatre in Albany to see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. While ostensibly starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, the real lead is young Thomas Horn, as a quirky nine-year-old who starts a quixotic quest all over “New York City for the lock that matches a mysterious key left behind by his father, who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.”
I was a couple minutes late, and the film (actually the previews) didn’t actually begin until the moment I walked in the room. Eventually three others also saw the film that showing.
The good news is that the flashback relationship between the boy and his father is compelling. Read the rest of this entry »
Shortly after I saw the black-and-white, mostly silent film The Artist at the Spectrum in Albany the weekend before last, someone asked me what I thought of it. “It’s very clever,” I said. “But is it good?” “It’s the best silent film I’ve seen this century.”
None of this is to say I didn’t thoroughly enjoy the film; more to the point, I would see it again. It’s fun, it’s well-acted, and particularly so, precisely because it IS a silent film, though with music, and the actors have to convey so much sans dialogue. It’s just that there are not that many contemporary films to which I can compare it. Read the rest of this entry »
When I was growing up, Baghdad sounded wonderfully exotic and ancient. After all, it was in Mesopotamia, that area between the Tigris and Euphrates, which is “widely considered to be the cradle of civilization.”
The meaning of the city’s name may be a “Middle Persian compound of Bag ‘god’ + dād ‘given’, translating to ‘God-given’ or ‘God’s gift’…A less probable guess has been Persian compound Bağ ‘garden’ + dād ‘fair’, translating to ‘The fair Garden.’ Regardless of the derivation, I had believed for some time in my youth that there was a literal Garden of Eden at one point, and it was located somewhere around there.
While the city’s roots date back to ancient Babylon, as a settlement as far back as 1800 B.C., in 762 A.D. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: ABC Wednesday, Baghdad, Baghdad Cafe, Iraq war, movies |
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Fairly early on in my reading of film critic Roger Ebert’s memoir, Life Itself, I decided that, if I were ever to write my own autobiography – not that I necessarily would – it should be modeled on this book. Organized thematically, with an overarching, but not strict, chronology, using short chapters (55 in 420 pages).
But I’m probably not going to write mine because I doubt I could be so descriptive. Ebert remembers things from his childhood which would have eluded me writing about mine. More importantly, though, he writes with incredible honesty. The very first line encapsulates the sensation: “I was born inside the movie of my life.” Yet, though known as probably the premiere movie critic of his time, he got the job “out of a clear blue sky,” and without much thought that it would be his life’s work.
Since I’ve started following him on various movie review TV programs Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Alan David Doane, books, Jaquandor, movies, reviews, Roger Ebert |
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My Week with Marilyn was based on a couple non-fiction book first published in the late 1990s. The Wife and I saw the film last Saturday at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, NY.
In 1956, Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) is directing and starring in the movie ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’ in London. He hires American film icon Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) to costar with him. The 30-year-old MM, accompanied by new, third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), is a sensation to the crowds in England. But Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: 30 Day Challenge, Marilyn Monroe, movies, My Week with Marilyn, reviews |
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