Bill Murray plays Steve Zissou with underwhelming relish. Zissou is supposed to be a kind of Jacques Cousteau, or a National Geographic oceanographer filmmaker or something, but he’s actually a grass-smoking aquatic fraud in the midst of a midlife crisis that may have begun at least thirty years previously. At least. When his best [...]
Hotel Rwanda
Hotel Rwanda: Bearing Witness On December 22, Hotel Rwanda, Golden Globe nominee for Best Motion Picture – Drama, will open in Los Angeles and New York. Directed by Terry George, Hotel Rwanda is the story of Paul Rusesabagina who can rightly be called Rwanda’s Oskar Schindler. With the support of his wife, [...]
The Aviator
Director Martin Scorsese marches to his own music. He makes a lot of dark films that don’t net him a lot of money (Bringing Out the Dead, for example.) I disliked Gangs of New York very much because it didn’t look authentic, it was not emotionally convincing and it seemed a big unwieldy violent beast. [...]
Spanglish
A woman at Princeton University’s admissions office opens an application and begins to read an essay. A girl’s voice over narrates the story of how she, Cristina, (Shelbie Bruce) and her mother, Flor (Paz Vega), came to the United States from Mexico, and their life once they arrived in Los Angeles. Flor works two [...]
The Sea Inside/Mar adentro
The Sea Inside/Mar adentro is based on the true story of Ramon Sampedro, a quadriplegic who struggled with the Spanish legal system for almost 30 years for the right to die, or the right to be put to death. The film is exquisitely directed by Alejandro Amenabar (The Others, writer for Vanilla Sky.) The [...]
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
This is the tale of the Baudelaire children: Violet, aged 14, Klaus, aged 12 and Sunny, the baby, who liked to chew things. One day while they are at the sea shore, their parents are killed in a fire and their house burned down. Mr. Poe, the banker, brings them the bad news and takes [...]
Million Dollar Baby
-spoiler- A male voice over tells the story of Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) who owns a gym in Los Angeles where would-be boxing contenders train. Frankie is a hardened trainer who studies Gaelic in his free time. Eddie (Morgan Freeman) is a kind of assistant maintenance man, who was one of Frankie’s fighters until he [...]
The Phantom of the Opera
Phantom of the Opera In Paris, a few years before World War I, there is an auction at the Paris Opera House. An old man and woman arrive separately to place their bids. When the auctioneer comes to the old chandelier, we are transported to another time, in the 1850’s, when the opera house was in [...]
Kinsey
Alfred Kinsey (1894 – 1956) was a zoologist at Indiana University. In the course of his teaching he realized that there was great ignorance among his students about human sexuality. He found that no one had ever studied the sexual behavior of the human animal, so he did. He began to research by conducting sex [...]
Ocean’s Twelve
I’m confused. Is Tess (Julia Roberts) the new member of the gang – # 12, or is it Molly Star (Cherry Jones)? Is it the French crook, Francois (Vincent Cassel) or Matsui (Robbie Coltaine)? Is it the mysterious La Marque (Albert Finney)? Nah. It must be Bruce Willis who just played Bruce Willis. On their [...]
