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Shortly before viewing the film Precious, I happened to see a youtube video of graduating students and their scrubby friends making a shambles of a high school commencement ceremony in inner-city Milwaukee. The week before, my own grueling school year at an urban high school in Milwaukee had just come to an end. So, I…
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“In a side-show circus, where the greatest attractions are deformed people, the gorgeous trapeze artist Cleopatra is the lover of the strong Hercules. She plays as if she liked the German midget Hans, who is in love with her, to borrow his money and get expensive gifts he gives to her. When the jealous German…
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Indie filmmaker goes inside the walls of area’s quirky homes (Published Jan. 3, 2007, 10:38 a.m.) Regular Week readers may remember the last film created by independent filmmaker Jim Muraco, Born and Bred, featuring dozens of Wisconsinites who made it big including Orson Wells, Steve Miller, Harry Houdini, Ellen Corby, Al Jarreau and Liberace. Well, Muraco…
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The Magdalene Sisters is to Irish nuns what Mommy Dearest is to Hollywood mothers. Peter Mullan’s controversial, occasionally brilliant, exposé of the horrifying trade in female flesh perpetrated in the 1970s by Catholic nuns in Ireland drags us through a series of atrocities that conjure images from Schindler’s List. Only, where the Speilberg film did…
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Arguably the best film from last year’s crop was, of course, overlooked in the Academy nominations for Best Picture. Memento, a remarkably innovative film by Christopher Nolan dazzled the crowd at its Sundance release and has won over just about everyone I know, except my eighty-nine-year-old father, who likes stories that travel neatly from point…
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There is much good in Peter Jackson’s rendition of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book of J.R.R. Tolkien’s great trilogy The Lord of the Rings. My ten-year-old son said the film was “awesome,” and from what I can tell, all his school-fellows agree. Yet, anyone who genuinely loves Tolkien’s work and understands what…
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Given the wave of mega-movies that swept over us recently – The Lord of the Rings, Blackhawk Down, and Harry Potter, to name just three – the smallness of Monster’s Ball is refreshing. The unwritten Hollywood creed used to be: Just tell a good story, tell it simply, and tell it well. No longer. The…
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Don’t be fooled by the title. I liked Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, although it leaves one as optimistic about the human condition as his other classic, Unforgiven, which left us with a “redeemed” William Munny reverted back to vigilante killer. And if your tastes run toward Oedipus the King, you may especially like Mystic River.…
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Hemlock Anyone? Room for Panic Some film producers have been in their own rooms too long. They need to get out more, take a walk, watch some children playing at the local park… Having seen the trailer for David Fincher’s Panic Room, I pretty much knew the whole story. Jodie Foster plays a woman, separated…
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He’s Not the Only One Depressed: Luther, the Film The one line that most viewers of the Luther film will remember, and there were not that many viewers – “Most days, I’m so depressed I can’t even get out of bed.” This from the father of the Protestant Reformation as he suffered the heaviness of…
