Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen
Posted on January 6th, 2011
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Excerpt: Tip O’Neill told us “all politics is local,” and I suppose that applies as well to a cloistered religious order as to a city. “Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen” is about a remarkable 12th century woman named Hildegard von Bingen, who was cloistered with a Benedictine order at a young age and rose to become its leader, the author of spiritual books, a composer of music and an expert in herbal medicine. Although beatified, she was never elevated to sainthood, but is a saint for many feminists and holistic practitioners. As embodied here by the powerful…
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Fair Game
Posted on January 6th, 2011
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Excerpt: It seems to come down to this: The Bush administration had decided to go to war in Iraq. Scrambling to find reasons to justify the war, it seized on reports that the African nation of Niger had sold uranium to Iraq. Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador to Niger, was sent to seek evidence. He found none. In fact, he found such sales would have been physically impossible. His report was ignored. We went to war. The non-existent uranium sales were cited. He wrote an article in the New York Times reporting on what he found, or didn’t find, in…
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For Colored Girls
Posted on January 6th, 2011
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Excerpt: Some plays resist filming. They exist as stage fantasies that can’t survive the greater realism of cinema. When a stage character performs a soliloquy, we understand exactly what’s happening. When a film character does it, it can feel strange. A monologue on film, sure — but not a poetic construction unlike the ordinary speech in the same film. Director-writer Tyler Perry’s ambitious “For Colored Girls” is based on the Tony-nominated “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” by Ntozake Shange. Many in the audience will have seen it onstage, and that will be an advantage;…
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Due Date
Posted on January 6th, 2011
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Excerpt: “Due Date” is nearly a down-market retread of the great comedy “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” It pairs up Robert Down-ey Jr. and Zack Galifianakis in the Steve Martin and John Candy roles, puts them in a car together, sends them down the highway, and doesn’t neglect to rip off one but two car doors. The first film by director Todd Phillips since his blockbuster “The Hangover” cheerfully includes some of the same raunchy humor and the same dogged persistence in the face of overwhelming character defects. It’s not as funny, but few films could be, and it does have…
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Megamind
Posted on January 6th, 2011
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Excerpt: “Megamind” was the third 3-D movie I’d seen in a row, and as I struggled to free my glasses from their industrial-strength plastic envelope, I wasn’t precisely looking forward to it. Why do 3-D glasses come so securely wrapped they seem like acts of hostility against the consumer? Once I freed my glasses and settled down, however, I was pleased to see a 3-D image that was quite acceptable. Too dim, as always, but the process was well-used and proves again that animation is incomparably more suited for 3-D than live action is. I’d just been rewatching “Superman”…
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Morning Glory
Posted on January 6th, 2011
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Excerpt: “Morning Glory” is a funny entertainment to begin with, and then Rachel McAdams transforms it. And Harrison Ford transforms himself. She plays as lovable a lead as anyone since Amy Adams in “Junebug,” and he bestirs himself from his frequent morosity and creates with gusto a TV newsman who is described as a great man, but the third worst person of all time. Diane Keaton is pitch-perfect a Colleen Peck, a morning TV host who can, and must, smile through everything. Comedies open every week. This is the kind I like best. It grows from human nature and is…
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127 Hours
Posted on January 6th, 2011
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Excerpt: Sometimes a person will make an enormous mistake and get a lot of time to think about it. There was a man who went over Niagara Falls sealed inside a big rubber ball. It never made it to the bottom. The ball lodged somewhere on the way down. He’d counted on his team to cut him out after he landed. Oops! Aron Ralston, the hero of “127 Hours,” had an oops! moment. That’s even what he calls it. He went hiking in the wilderness without telling anyone where he was going, and then in a deep, narrow crevice, got…
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Unstoppable
Posted on January 6th, 2011
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Excerpt: The freight train pulls out of a siding with no engineer alt=”" border=”0″> Denzel Washington and Chris Pine. (Enlarge Image) Chase scenes involving trains have an unavoidable limit: Trains require tracks and can only go forward or in reverse. There are sidings, but getting on to one may not be very simple. Two other films that come to mind are Buster Keaton’s “The General” (1926) and Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Runaway Train” (1985), which won Oscar nominations for the two men in its locomotive, Jon Voight and Eric Roberts. How Scott deals with his “chase” is not for me to…
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Four Lions
Posted on January 6th, 2011
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Excerpt: There’s a difference between blowing up people and blowing up things. When the African National Congress in South Africa was bombing power pylons, that made strategic sense. When terrorists blow up people (and themselves), it strikes me as self-defeating idiocy. Believing in heaven is commonplace. But surely only a stupid person would blow himself up to get there sooner. “Four Lions” is a transgressive comedy about five such people. They live in an anonymous British suburb and dream of jihad. They speak such a fluent mixture of working-class Brit slang and argot, in such fluent accents, that it’s odd…
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
Posted on January 6th, 2011
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Excerpt: Harry, Hermione and Ron have grown up. The horrors they met at Hogwarts are but nostalgic memories. They are cast out now into the vastness of the world, alt=”" border=”0″> Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort. (Enlarge Image) Much has to do with tracking down missing pieces of Voldemort’s soul. The late, beloved Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) has left obscure clues to their whereabouts, leading to two observations: (1) Beyond a certain level of obscurity, a clue lacks usefulness, and (2) How extraordinary careless of Voldemort to leave missing pieces of his soul lying about.This installment ends in midstream, which we…
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