Year: 2013
The best comedies go for truths, not laughs. And, although “Silver Linings Playbook” is billed as a comedy, it is more a romance between two young adults with bipolar disorder whose families and friends have to deal with the turmoil that mental illness creates.
David O. Russell, the director of this blockbuster multiple Academy Award winner, wrote the screenplay partly as an acknowledgement of his son’s bipolar disorder and as a message about this form of mental illness. Russell has delivered two sympathetic characters to raise our awareness. In this way, “Silver Linings...
“Parade’s End”–An Historian’s Downton Abbey?”
The five-part BBC/HBO miniseries “Parade’s End” premiered on HBO last week (February 26) and is also available on video-on-demand. The playwright Tom Stoppard has adapted Ford Madox Ford’s monumental 900 page, four-novel series “Parade’s End” for television: the intellectual’s Edwardian-era alternative to “Downton Abbey.” Both series take place in the same time period, beginning with the decade before the First World War. But the view of the British class system, the end of the Empire, and the attitude towards the war could not be more...
“Water Marks”–What Lies Beneath the Surface
“Water Marks”, the current exhibition at Pacific Grove Art Center (PGAC), features approximately 50 Monterey Bay area printmakers who have created etchings, woodcuts, screenprints, monotypes and mixed media prints focusing on the theme of water surrounding our beautiful Monterey peninsula. The Monterey Peninsula College (MPC) Printmakers is an association of artists who are passionate about printmaking in all its variety of forms and techniques.
This exhibit is analogous to a “watermark” in that the artwork requires more than a casual viewing. Printmaking can be...
“Amour”– A Somber Sonnet to Love
This year’s Cannes Film Festival winner is a film like no other on the dissolution and disintegration of life and the toll it throws at love. As a five-time Academy Award nominee, “Amour“, directed by the Austrian Michael Haneke, is a spellbinding masterpiece. The superb Jean-Louis Trintignant of “A Man and a Woman” fame and the delicate Emanuelle Riva who stunned audiences in “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” are the capstone of this film.
Playing two retired octogenarian music teachers (Georges and Anne), these two masterful actors portray a deep and time-tested...
“House of Cards” — A Bulimic Buffet for Couch Potatoes?
Why wait a week to watch another episode when an entire buffet is available? A lot has been written recently about “binge-watching” the practice of sitting on the couch or in bed to gorge on an entire season or a majority of episodes of a television series in one batch. The bulimic viewer was not possible before Tivo, DVRs and Netflix video streaming (aka Instant Queue). Netflix has given us 13 episodes of “House of Cards”, a reinterpretation of the 1990 BBC miniseries which starred Sir Ian Richardson as a conniving Parliamentarian who rose to the level of prime minister before...
Following “The Following”
A Fox television drama series starring Kevin Bacon and James Purefoy (the British actor who brilliantly played Marc Antony in the “Rome” series), “The Following” premiered two weeks ago (January 21). It is already gaining a fervent, mostly young audience.
A furloughed FBI agent, Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon), responsible for the imprisonment of the brutal serial killer Joe Carroll (James Purefoy), is brought back into action when Carroll masterminds a series of copycat murders perpetrated by a cult following (think Charles Manson meets Silence of the Lambs). But Carroll...