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Month: February 2024

Past Lives (2023)–You Only Remember One

In Celine Song’s directorial debut, the Academy-Award nominated Past Lives, we see an exploration of a long-distance friendship between two childhood playmates  from South Korea.  Nora (Greta Lee) moves with her family to Canada when she is twelve years old.  Her friend Hae-sung (Teo Yoo), still yearning for her years afterwards, remains in South Korea pursuing his professional career as a lawyer.  While both have a shared past as the closest of friends, as adults that is insufficient for a long-sought reunion by Hae-sung. Anything but bittersweet and  frustrating, nonetheless the...

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Society of the Snow–The Taste of Friendship

Society of the Snow is  a riveting Spanish film nominated this year for an  Academy Award as best foreign film.  The opening scenes feature a team of young rugby players  ready to board an Uruguayan flight to compete in an international competition in Chile.  All hyped up, testosterone driven to realize their  team’s rise to international stardom, the team’s plane crashes into  one of the remotest parts of the Andes and into the most hostile terrain imaginable.  Society of the Snow is  based upon  the 1972 Andes plane crash that is the Donner Pass equivalent of a brutally...

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American Fiction–Truth or Dare

The 2024 Academy-Award nominated indie film, American Fiction,  directed by Cord Jefferson, is  based upon the 2001 novel, “Erasure”, by Percival Everett. Black novelist and literature professor Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), nicknamed “Monk” (perhaps after the famous jazz musician) is incensed that his novels are not well-received by readers, both Black and White.  An academic specializing in Greek mythology and drama, his books are nonetheless shelved under African American literature in bookstores.  Monk is an upper-class intellectual with a gay brother (Sterling...

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Year of the Dragon 2024–February  10, 2024, through Jan. 28, 2025

Happy Lunar New Year, everyone!  Good luck from dragon fire  breathed into your lives with excitement and creativity! 2024 is the Year of the Wood Dragon.  It is particularly a favorable time for change, growth, and progress.  The combination of the dragon’s dynamic energy and the grounding and stabilizing influence of the wood element will inspire imagination, leadership, and the creation of new ideas. In general, the dragon is a harbinger of great fortune,  yet unpredictable, regardless of what type of Dragon year we are in.  Its mystery is never...

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