Author: Diana Paul
Viewers are treated, in this 24-episode series, Mr. Sunshine, to a glimpse of Korean history that few outside of Korea will be familiar with . Screenwriting legend, Kim Eun Sook, has created an intricate historical romance set in 1871, when a US military ship docked in Korea, wishes to expand into Asia for the exploitation of natural resources and land. We first are introduced to Mr. Sunshine , Eugene Choi (Lee Byung-hun), as a nine-year old Korean boy born into a family of slaves. In a dramatic turn of events, the little boy runs away with an American missionary to New York...
The White Ribbon [Das Weisse Band]
[Guest reviewer Barbara Artson, author of the novel Odessa, Odessa ]
Director Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009) opens in total darkness. We see nothing but hear only the elderly voice of a narrator:
“I don’t know if the story that I want to tell you is entirely true. Some of it I only know by hearsay, and after so many years it remains obscure today, and I must leave it in darkness.”
And
so the schoolteacher narrator, now an
old man, begins his rendering in a series of flashbacks, depicting the
mystifying and horrific happenings that...
“For Sama”—A Letter to My Daughter
For Sama is the most searing documentary about war that I have ever seen. Nominated this year for an Academy Award for Best International Film, For Sama presents some of the most unflinching war coverage and remarkable and courageous footage. A love letter to her infant daughter Sama, born in Aleppo, For Sama is a Syrian mother’s first-person account of the bombing of her beloved homeland over a period of five years. Aleppo, at the time, was one of the last strongholds resisting the Assad dictatorship.
Waad Al-Khateab is the Syrian
producer, cinematographer and hero of
this...
“Clemency”–No Mercy or Absolution
What’s the psychological and moral cost to a
society that administers the death penalty? That’s the question raised in Clemency, the winner of the Sundance drama award last year.
So much more than a “death-row drama” ,
Clemency shifts the lens to the
impact of bureaucratized
human cruelty: a scathing
portrait of the toll the process of administering an execution has on prison
staff. We see how they are not executioners but bureaucratic cogs in a horrible
machine of death.
Sixty-something Bernadine (the remarkable African American actor Alfre...
The Report—An Exposé for Us All
Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EIT)—is the focus of The Report, a provocative Amazon political thriller. A Senate staff researcher, Daniel Jones (Adam Driver) is assigned by Sen. Diane Feinstein (Annette Bening) to investigate detainees held by the CIA in “black sites”. A shameful chapter of American history unfolds , where torture was re-introduced as a legitimate tool in pursuit of national security.
The Report employs flashbacks of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that are frightening and harrowing. Flashing back to 2001 immediately after 9/11, the anxiety...
1917—This Great War Is Not So Great
The multiple award-winning 1917 is inspired by “American Beauty” writer-director Sam Mendes’s great grandfather’s experience during World War I. Almost everything you’ve ever seen in a war film is here in 1917. There are several homages to the classic Stanley Kubrick film, “Paths of Glory” (1957), including the technique of tracking a long take, seemingly a continuous single-shot with no cuts, of the brutal trench warfare that cost 9-12 million soldiers’ lives. (The calculus for civilian deaths would double the total.) It is as if we’re in...