Tag: film

Existential Time: Cloud Atlas and The Apu Trilogy, Billy Budd, The Company You Keep, Django Unchained, Flight, Grand Canyon, Inescapable, Lawless, Lean On Me, Lincoln, Matewan, Temptation, To the Wonder, and Wuthering Heights

Those were perspectives put forth in particular times, and they inspired fervent debate and disagreement. However, we, in successive generations, do not have to take sides for or against any man: we can look at their reasons and their results and take what is useful as the changing times demand. We can affirm classical studies and vocational training, democratic participation in the larger world and attention to particular communities, and nonviolence when it is sensible and violent self-defense when it is necessary.

Political Film and Conversation: Elia Kazan’s Wild River and Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land and Zero Dark Thirty, In the Land of Blood and Honey, and A Bottle in the Gaza Sea.

Is there enough beauty and knowledge in the world? What are the virtues we want to cultivate and celebrate? What pain do we want to ease? Where there is injustice, do we want justice? What kind of culture do we want to live in, and with? Many people do not understand art, its technique or its mission, but art conveys living experience and contemplation of life better than almost anything else.

A Tragedy of Passion and Power: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley, Jude Law, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, directed by Joe Wright

It is amazing how much content there is in this glittering work.  The love of Anna and Vronsky is not the only love in the film.  Levin, a great friend of Anna’s brother, a man with a country estate, is in love with Kitty who was infatuated with Vronsky, until Vronsky met Anna; and Levin has a drunken, rebellious brother, a radical watched by security forces, who married a woman who worked in a brothel. 

Shadows of Terror and Comfort on Dark Cave Walls: Adam’s Rib, Antony & Cleopatra, Argo, Bully, The Cabin in the Woods, The Dark Knight Rises, East of Eden, Killer Joe, Liberal Arts, Our Beloved Month of August and more

One takes a survey of the past and present at different times, trying to ascertain merit: and here, I consider Adam’s Rib, An American in Paris, Antony and Cleopatra, Argo, Bully, The Cabin in the Woods, A Clockwork Orange, The Dark Knight Rises, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, East of Eden, Farewell My Queen, Fur, Garden State, Killer Joe, King Creole, Liberal Arts, Midnight in Paris, Notorious, Our Beloved Month of August, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Portrait of a Lady, Rosewood, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, The Shawshank Redemption, Silent Souls, Sparkle, Splendor in the Grass, and more.