Trailer: The Tempest

Posted on October 15, 2010 at 3:59 pm

I am very excited about the upcoming release of “The Tempest” (described here as “Shakespeare’s final masterpiece”), starring Helen Mirren and directed by Julie Taymor (forever known as the woman behind the stage version of “The Lion King”). “The Tempest” is the story of a sorcerer named Prospero who was once a king, but, distracted by his study of magic, was deposed and exiled by his brother to a remote island, accompanied by his daughter Miranda. Mirren takes the lead as “Prospera,” who uses her powers to shipwreck her brother’s boat, bringing them to her island to right the wrongs of the past, with the help of spirits Ariel and Caliban. The cast includes Alan Cummings, Alfred Molina, Russell Brand, Tom Conti, and Djimon Hounsou.

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Water: Blog Action Day 2010

Posted on October 15, 2010 at 8:00 am

I am proud to be a part of Blog Action Day 2010. This year, the issue is vitally important — water.

Blog Action Day 2010: Water from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

Some great movies about water:

1. Oceans Huge, swooping creatures with bright speckles; shape transforming beasts that pounce and gobble up crabs; gelatinous monsters that glow; all this and more is captured in this stunning film.

2. FLOW: For Love of Water This documentary finds a good balance between terrifying statistics, depressing images, talking heads, and hopeful suggestions.

3. Blue Gold: World Water Wars Corporate control of water puts the supply at risk for everyone.

4. Running Dry This film is so powerful it inspired the Senator Paul Simon Water Act for the Poor, which funds clean, safe water in areas that otherwise wouldn’t have it. It was based on the senator’s book, Tapped Out: The Coming World Crisis in Water and What We Can Do About It. There is a 2008 sequel, The American Southwest: Are We Running Dry? focusing on domestic water shortages.

5. The End of the Line The catastrophic consequences of over-fishing are explored in this documentary, which comes with a pocket guide to help decide what to buy in grocery stores and restaurants.

Howl

Posted on October 14, 2010 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	NR
Profanity:	Very strong and explicit language with sexual references, some crude
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 15, 2010

In the post-WWII era of peace and prosperity — and the Cold War and the blacklist and conformity — a small group of writers found much to terrify and infuriate them. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” one of them wrote, the beginning of a barbaric yawp of a poem of fury and protest called “Howl.” His name was Allen Ginsberg.
This movie is not the story of Ginsberg (smoothly played by James Franco), who would go on to become one of the 20th century’s most acclaimed and influential poets, though he is affecting, even at times electric. It is the story of the poem itself, taking us back and forth between three key moments. First is Ginsberg’s own performance, reading the poem aloud in a small, smoky club. Second is an interview two years later with a now-bearded Ginsberg in his apartment. And third is a courtroom, where the obscenity charges brought not against Ginsberg but against his publisher, fellow poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, were being argued.
“Experts” (Mary-Louise Parker, Alessandro Nivola, Jeff Daniels) debate the literary merit and destructively prurient content of Ginsberg’s work on the witness stand. The prosecution (David Straithairn) argues that the poem is so detrimental to the minds of Americans that it should not even be seen. For the defense, Jake Ehrlich (“Man Men’s” Jon Hamm), with a natty four-cornered pocket square handkerchief, who shows the court that far more important than any expert’s opinion on the value of Howl as a work of art is the freedom for Americans to decide that issue for themselves.
And for me at least, that is where the real poetry is.

(more…)

Aron Ralston and ‘127 Hours’

Posted on October 14, 2010 at 7:17 am

James Franco stars in the upcoming “127 Hours” as engineer/mountaineer Aron Ralston, who was climbing alone in the Utah canyons on what he thought would be a day trip when a boulder fell on his arm, pinning him against the canyon wall. For six days, unable to move, he tried to chip or push it away. Finally, he understood that in order to survive, he would have to lose his hand and lower portion of his arm. He performed a self-amputation with only a dull knife, rappelled one-armed down the side of the mountain, and walked six miles to get help. His book, Between a Rock and a Hard Place tells the story.

Writer-director Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire”) has made this extraordinary achievement into a movie of great power, touching, moving, exciting, and inspiring. And Franco gives one of the best performances of the year.

Here is the real Aron Ralston, who now uses his story to help audiences think about what we can do to survive, how to analyze and solve problems, how to think about priorities, about healing, the importance of taking responsibility and how to be fully alive, which means being fully grateful.

Read other stories of defining moments and share your own.

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Jonah Hex

Posted on October 12, 2010 at 8:00 am

Josh Brolin plays Jonah Hex, a man transformed by loss in a fantasy western set just after the Civil War, based on the series of comics and graphic novels. The war is over in the United States, but it continues to haunt Hex, who rides the West as a gun for hire still wearing his Confederate Uniform.

Hex has no friends, at least not any who are alive. He has one enemy, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), who made Hex watch as he ordered his men to make Hex suffer as he had, to watch as he loses everything he loves and has to live on, scarred inside and out. After Turnbull burns down Hex’s home with his wife and child inside, he orders his men to apply a fiery brand to Hex’s face, burning through the skin to the jawbone. “Every day that mark will remind you of the man who took everything you had.”

But that physically and psychologically searing experience gave Hex something, too. “It left me with the curse of talking to the other side,” he tells us. And so he rides, feeling nothing but vengeance, a gunman for hire, haunted by the dead and answerable to no one but himself.

Turnbull steals the most powerful weapon ever made, a sort of pre-industrial age H-bomb, And President Grant (Aidan Quinn) orders Lieutenant Grass (Will Arnett) to get Hex to find Turnbull and stop his plan to bring down the United States government as it reaches its 100th birthday.

It has a trim just-over-80 minutes running time, so I’m guessing there will be a future DVD release with a lot of deleted scenes. But the lean story-telling works well for its taciturn characters and spare settings, beautifully presented by cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen, and well scored by Marco Beltrami and John Powell with assistance from Mastodon. The blend of history and fantasy, both tweaking and saluting the conventions of both genres, works better than the clumsy references to current concerns like terrorism and tea party anti-government sentiment. Brolin is as at home in the role as he is in the saddle. As (of course) a prostitute with a mean right hook and, at least for Hex, a heart of gold, Megan Fox has to learn that a husky voice and a smoldering look are not enough to create a character. On the other hand, in that wasp-waisted corset (reportedly a Scarlett O’Hara-size 18 inches in diameter) she should get an award for staying upright.