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Month: February 2018

Black Sea (2014)–The Darkness Beneath the Surface

  The British-American disaster thriller Black Sea stars  Jude Law as a veteran (Robinson) deep-sea salvage captain, recently unemployed and divorced with a young son. While dejected and wondering what his future holds, Robinson has drinks with a fellow co-worker, Kurston, in similar circumstances.    Soon the two friends assemble a misfit crew to go after the treasure (rumored to be worth millions in gold bullion) from a World War II U-boat sunken in the Black Sea.   After meeting with a financial backer known only as Lewis, they set off on their adventure agreeing to a 60/40 split with...

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Phantom Thread: Moving Through Love, Death and Genius

[Bill Clark, Guest Blogger]   In an early scene of writer / director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Academy-Award nominated Phantom Thread,  Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) gazes across the dinner table at Alma (Vicky Krieps) who he hopes will be his next easy conquest. After all, he’s the renowned haute couture dressmaker in 1950s London who clothes royalty and celebrities. She’s just a waitress he picked up earlier in the day. She returns his look with her own dark-eyed steady gaze: “If this is a staring match, you’re going to lose.” And so it begins – a contest of wills and loves,...

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The Vietnam War–Closure or Catharsis?

The Vietnam War Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s PBS masterpiece, The Vietnam War is a mournful, heartbreaking documentary: an essential expose and an unvarnished history of war. The refocusing of history using first-person stories is the most important “Ken Burns effect” producing his best documentary to date. Burns loves to film everyday people’s “small” stories which give perspective and emotion to the larger picture.   The interviews are unforgettable and poignant–a viscerally searing reminder why there is no winner in war. The human faces, together with the visible...

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“I Am Not Your Negro”–James Baldwin

  Nominated this year for the Academy Award for best documentary, I Am Not Your Negro is the best film in this category I have ever seen. An indie film (and PBS Independent Lens program) I Am Not Your Negro gives us a fuller understanding of the brilliant mind and soul of James Baldwin, a critical thinker, writer, and essayist, whose work is not as well-known as it should be. At the time of Baldwin’s death in 1987, he left behind thirty pages of an unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, interweaving his incisive and excoriating psychological analysis of race, national identity,...

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