Tag Archives: Film

Can Art Perform in the Face of Death?

Film Friday – 2010 in Review One of my favorite holiday films is the comic melodrama Family Stone (2008), the story of a family’s Christmas reunion. Despite their determination to put on a happy front, the family must face up to a number of underlying tensions. Foremost among these is the mother’s terminal cancer, which […]

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Lives Impacted by Film, Part II

  Film Friday Last Friday I reported that Julia and I were on our way to a dinner with our film group and that we had an assignment: to come up with 3-5 films and explain how they had impacted our lives. The evening was a smashing success, and I recommend the idea to others. […]

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A Hysterical Response to a Masterpiece

Film Friday The film I write on today is one that has the resonance of great literature. It is also a film that affirms our humanity in the face of fear. Since too often we let fear set us against one another, it is good to look at a work of art that reminds us […]

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Lee’s Film Has More Sensibility than Sense

  Film Friday A while back I wrote about how Patricia Rozema’s film of Mansfield Park sells Jane Austen short. Today I accuse Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995) of doing the same. When the film came out, I remember hearing an interview with Lee (maybe on National Public Radio) about how his affinity with Jane […]

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The Greatest Clown of Them All

Film Friday I have wonderful childhood memories of going to the movies with my parents. That’s why I am particularly fond of the opening scene of James Agee’s novel Death in the Family (1957), where six-year-old Rufus is shown attending a Charlie Chaplin short with his father. The year is 1915. I have seen many […]

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Films that Mishandle the Faustus Story

Film Friday The baseball playoffs, which concluded with a San Francisco win over the Texas Rangers this past week, have had me thinking about the Faustus story and how many modern renditions of the story get it wrong. If this seems like a leap, let me explain. The Texas Rangers used to be the Washington […]

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Walt Whitman, William Blake, and Baseball

Film Friday The World Series between the Texas Rangers and the San Francisco Giants gives me an excuse for posting on what is, in my opinion, the greatest movie on baseball. Among the many virtues of Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham are its literary allusions and its literariness. Each year Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) chooses to […]

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Tolstoy and Celebrity Culture

Film Friday Before there was celebrity culture there was celebrity culture. That’s what we learn from The Last Station, the fascinating recent film about the last days of Leo Tolstoy. The year is 1910.  Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) is seen as a national treasure and there is a struggle underway over who owns his work.  His […]

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Austen Films Underestimate Her Heroines

Film Friday I’ve been amazed at the success of the Jane Austen industry in recent years. Fan though I am, I never could have predicted the hunger for movie and television versions of her novels, movie biographies of the author, sequels to Pride and Prejudice, horror versions of her novels, novels where characters from different […]

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