Band of Horses recently burst back into prominence with their second album, “Cease To Begin”, a distinct improvement from their debut effort, 2006’s “Everything All The Time”. The collection plays with more sounds and styles, and reflects the band growing up and moving back home to South Carolina, and has a bit more of a country tinge to their dreamy indie-rock/pop.
Opening with the beautiful highlight of the album, “Is There A Ghost?”, is a...
Despite the rating you see to your left, the first ninety minutes of Marc Forster's The Kite Runner are not wholly unenjoyable. The film's subject matter and thematic overtones are too familiar and somewhat bland, but one can forgive the filmmakers for their earnest attempt. There is nothing here particularly remarkable, but there is nothing here particularly offensive. Had the film continued on the path on which it seemed to be, I certainly would not have felt cheated out...
The scene is set in the early twentieth century suburban Britain with smartly tailored suits, flowing dresses, stiff necks, high noses and filtered cigarettes. The Post-World War I and Pre-World War II political turmoil is shown having its effect on life in general. So one can only imagine what pleasant drift from reality the first few minutes of the film hold. Typewriter keys tap as everyday happenings of those times are portrayed in the foreground. The acoustic effects along with that of...
Let me say right off that the subtitles for this movie were terrible. Sometimes they were late, sometimes they appeared before anyone started speaking, sometimes they disappeared before I had the chance to read the whole of the text. And when there were exchanges of dialogue (which, oddly enough, does frequently occur in movies) it was often not apparent who was saying what.
But let's put that aside. And let's also put aside the absurd Renaissance faire...
In short, Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code is a very good movie with a lot of great things in it. The movie is not “great”, and to me certainly not something that Ron Howard put his heart in to. Though not consistent, the man has some incredibly great and/or enjoyable movies under his belt. Have you seen Splash, Gung Ho, Backdraft, Cocoon or Apollo 13? Even very recently I found both Cinderella Man and A Beautiful Mind to be outstanding and compelling movie making. The word...
Lost Horizon is a film about paradise and the temperament it takes to chose paradise over, let’s say, reality. In it, a small group of British nationals (and one American) are hijacked as they are fleeing war-torn China and taken to the mountains of Tibet, where they are lead to the mythical valley that is Shangri-La. It is a paradise indeed, a sunny, idyllic, self-sustaining farming community and palace miraculously sheltered from the wind and snows that plague the rest of...
On Friday night, I finished reading the best book I’ve read in a while (although, lately, I haven’t been doing much reading), Ben Elton’s Blast from the Past. It was alternately funny and sweet and terrifying, as it dealt with the ways people get intertwined with each other, often despite their intentions or even, in the case of the protagonist’s obsessed stalker, violently against their wishes. To go from that world to the one meticulously constructed in...
I may not know much of anything about Japan, apart from what can be inferred from anime, one travel book written in the fifties, and the occasional pop novel. I may not be, as my colleague so obviously is, overly familiar with the works of Akira Kurosawa, though having hung out with some people who were fascinated with that country and its culture, I’ve seen pieces of at least three different films of his. But if I have an area of expertise, it is the life and legend of Macbeth, and...
Relentlessly Good Movie with a Great Cast
It has been almost a decade since Harrison Ford’s incredible Air Force One. Any devoted fan could lose faith after any two of his last few movies; Hollywood Homicide, Random Hearts, [gasp]
Somewhere I read that the monarch/aristocrat with democratic values was a peculiarly American invention, that is an invention of Hollywood, and that thought was running through my mind when I watched this movie last night at the Virginia Theater in downtown Champaign. Though I wish I could remember who said it, and about what.
However, Mutiny on the Bounty, at least this version (1935, the second of at least five movies), gives you a fairly good example of that American...
