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 about the [...]

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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 timely.

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Lawyers on film

The cover story of the latest ABA Journal is the 25 Greatest Legal Movies. I’m not at all surprised at that top two but was very pleasantly surprised that My Cousin Viommy ws third. I never tire of this movie, which contains perhaps the most concise opening statement ever: “Everything that guy just said is [...]

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A touch of listmania

A while ago I discovered Lists of Bests, a site that is just what the name implies. It is a list of “bests,” whether by award or personal preference. Looking at it this weekend, I wondered if the fact I hadn’t read any of the National Book Critics Circle award winners this year was unusual. [...]

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Dystopian movies — and acknowledging reality

In light of my recent post about modern life and dystopias, the Dystopian Movie meme I found at SFSignal seemed timely. The rule is simply to put in bold the movies you’ve seen from the following list of top 50 dystopian movies.

Metropolis (1927) A Clockwork Orange (1971) Brazil (1985) Wings of Desire (1987) Blade [...]

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An American madrassa

It is unquestionably the most frightening movie I have seen in years. It actually bordered on making me feel physically ill. This isn’t some gory horror movie or some graphic war footage. It is the Oscar-nominated documentary Jesus Camp.

The film takes us inside the homes and churches of children from Missouri who end up [...]

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Star Wars truth

I was initially going to mention in passing another reason I gotta like John Scalzi but it’s just too good to be thrown in with other items.

I have always said Star Wars was merely a conglomeration of themes, ideas and even characters “borrowed” from great SF, westerns and almost anything else you can mention. [...]

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An Inconvenient Truth

While on the first “college shopping” trip with my middle daughter, we saw An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary of Al Gore’s mission to convince others that humans are responsible for global warming. There’s a few obvious problems with it but overall it is convincing and deserving of the praise it has received thus far.

The [...]

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Movie literacy

I saw a reference on kottke.org to an LA Times column in which film critic Jim Emerson listed 1030 movies a person should know, “at minimum, to be somewhat ‘movie-literate.’” I decided to see how “literate” I am. Movies I’ve seen are in bold, ones in my Netflix queue are underlined and those with no [...]

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DVD quick takes

Ben Folds and WASO – Live in Perth (2005) 3/5

Ben Folds joins forces with the 90-member Western Australian Symphony Orchestra in this 80-minute DVD of concert performances in Perth, Australia, in March. Some songs make the transition; others don’t. It’s an interesting but not awe-inspiring performance. I found it enjoyable largely because about half [...]

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