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  • American Taliban

    American Taliban by Pearl Abraham


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Favorite Film Friday: Reds

Love stories don’t rank well on my list of preferred movies. When you get right down to it, though, one of my favorite movies — Reds — is just that, a love story, albeit one played out on an epic background. It’s the background that gets me.

Written, produced and directed by its star, [...]

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Favorite Film Friday: Midnight Cowboy

For whatever reason, I don’t recall where or when I first saw Midnight Cowboy. But I do know that from that very first time, one scene and piece of dialogue has stuck with me.

“Ratso” Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman, and Joe Buck (Jon Voight) are crossing a street in downtown New York City against [...]

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Favorite Film Friday: American History X

There’s a couple reasons American History X makes my favorite movies list. One is simply that it’s a compelling look at a disturbing topic — neo-Nazism among young American men. Another is that it was a major step in Edward Norton becoming one of my favorite actors.

At first, you may not think this [...]

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Favorite Film Friday: Network

I’ll be honest. Network only recently became one of my favorite films. I saw it shortly after it was released in late 1976 but let some 30 years elapse before watching it over Thanksgiving. When I first saw it, I considered it biting commentary. Now, sadly, I consider it prescient.

Perhaps best [...]

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Favorite Film Friday: Good Bye Lenin!

It’s been too long since the last installment in this series and the celebrations this week over the fall of the Berlin Wall create a perfect opportunity to talk about Good Bye, Lenin!. While the movie is about the fall of the wall and Communism, it presents an innovative and fun take on it.

The [...]

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Favorite Film Friday: The Great Escape

I was just shy of seven years old when The Great Escape came out. I’ve watched it perhaps more times than any other movie and loved the book on which it was based almost as much. And in the course of three months this summer, it’s received some manly recognition: it not [...]

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Favorite Film Friday: 2001: A Space Odyssey

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. I do have one huge regret about all those viewings, though. None has been in a movie theater on a big screen.

I was 11 when the movie came out in 1968. I asked my parents to let me [...]

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Favorite Film Friday: Apocalypse Now

Maybe it’s the fact I grew up during the Vietnam War but I’m a fan of many of the movies about it. Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the setting of that war, is a classic. I’m not alone in that opinion.

Rotten Tomatoes’ critics give American [...]

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Favorite Film Friday: American Beauty

I’m modifying an idea I saw on a book blog recently — revisiting favorites from your past. While that concept was favorite books, mine is going to be favorite movies. These aren’t going to be reviews of the films, just a link or two to assembled opinion on the films and my thoughts [...]

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Celebrate an upcoming world premiere – buy the DVD

It took a while (and more work than I can probably imagine) but Unplanned Democracy, the documentary about South Dakota’s 2006 abortion ban vote written and directed by Denise Ross, has its world premiere Saturday at the South Dakota Film Festival. Given that South Dakotans face another abortion vote in November, the premiere is [...]

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