‘Recommended movies’Category

Florida, Recommended movies
24
Apr 09

Classroom Chaos

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Classroom Chaos

I can’t imagine a more poignant or tragic portrayal of classroom chaos than that depicted in the French film The Class. Fictional but shot documentary style, the story shows a teacher’s persistent but futile attempt to reach students mired in pubescent rebellion and complex culture clashes.

Throughout the film I kept thinking of my school days, serene and boring in comparison. But that was the 1960s in Central Florida, when classroom order and conformity resembled the symmetry and prevalence of orange groves. Everything has changed there, too.

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Florida, Portland, Recommended movies
13
Apr 09

Harmonies and Howls

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Last night during a concert of earnest and ethereal harmonies, I struggled to keep another sound at bay.

Pressed against the stage at the Crystal Ballroom, five feet from Fleet Foxes‘ lead singer Robin Pecknold and bathed in his melodic voice, I occasionally heard in my head not him but the quavering wail of a toothless derelict.

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Recommended movies
02
Feb 09

Wrestling With Demons

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Wrestling With Demons

Until seeing Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler last week, I thought only Daniel Day-Lewis could so completely inhabit a movie character. Or Robert DeNiro when he did serious roles.

Battling frailties and demons galore, Rourke’s character makes one ponder the fates of wrestlers once age and countless poundings have taken a despairing toll.

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Observed, Portland, Recommended movies
15
Jan 09

Cannibalism and Love

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Cannibalism and Love

Hard to correlate these two disparate ideas: airplane crash victims lost high in the Andes resorting to cannibalism, and stark humanity imbued with love.

But that’s what played out on the movie screen tonight in the documentary Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains. After the plane carrying the Uruguayan ruby team went down in October 1972, sixteen of the forty-five passengers survived for more than two months. Had they not eaten from the bodies of their dead companions, they too would have died in the aptly named Valley of Tears. They were rescued when two team members trekked for days through towering peaks.

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Recommended movies
29
Dec 08

More Than “A Christmas Tale”

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More Than “A Christmas Tale”

Sometimes, rarely actually, a movie stuns me. Leaves me in awe. Not fully grasping what I’ve just seen, I want to watch it again and again.

That’s how I feel twenty-four hours after watching “A Christmas Tale.” The French film examines the complexities of a dysfunctional, estranged family reunited for the holiday. Typically that subject wouldn’t interest me. But there’s so much more to it in this film.

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Florida, Recommended movies, Television, Writing
24
Nov 08

Swamps in My Blood

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Swamps in My Blood

Until HBO’s True Blood, I can’t recall a television series with an opening sequence more riveting than the show itself. A foreboding mix of lust, religion, and evil, the montage casts a memorable spell. With each viewing, I’m drawn deeper into the stark settings.

While I enjoyed the series’ first season, which wrapped up Sunday, it fell short of HBO classics The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, and The Sopranos. I learned tonight via MetaFilter that a documentary inspired the opening, propelling Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus to the top of my must-see list.

The visceral appeal of True Blood’s opening isn’t the sex. It’s the southern swamps. I trudged through them in my youth. They entered my blood.

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Florida, Memories, Recommended movies
09
Jun 08

‘The Graduate,’ without sequel

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On the radio, Garrison Keillor says writer Charles Webb turns sixty-nine today. Webb wrote The Graduate, the book on which the 1967 movie was based. News to me is Webb’s sequel, published in January.

A little research shows Home School is a sequel in name only. Not worth reading, not worth risking the original story losing its special status. Good stories end; finality keeps them very much alive.

My first encounter with The Graduate was the movie starring Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock and Katherine Ross as Elaine Robinson. I didn’t read the book until I had seen the movie five times — the first with guy friends, the last four alone — before graduating from high school in 1968.

I imagined myself as Benjamin after his affair with Elaine’s mother, Anne Bancroft’s iconic Mrs. Robinson. I loved his Alfa Romeo sports car, the way he drove it balls-to-the-wall, how good he looked unshaven and disheveled, how he questioned his advantaged life, how he did whatever it took against impossible odds to win Elaine’s heart from the superficial, pretty-boy college guy.

I wanted to be Benjamin the intellectually gifted outsider, the rebel whose persona exuded a secret charm that attracted girls like Elaine. At Winter Park High in Florida, such girls were my friends but beyond my romantic reach.

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