movie reviews – Page 66 – Unhealed Wound

“Swimming with Sharks”–Taking a Dive from the Corporate Ladder

Written by diana on March 24, 2011. Posted in movie reviews. 1 Comment on “Swimming with Sharks”–Taking a Dive from the Corporate Ladder

Our son graduated from college about a year ago and has had several internships in the entertainment industry, mainly reality TV and independent movies, while he searches for his next career step. One of his former supervisors recommended “Swimming with Sharks”, for an insider’s view of what working as a low-level assistant for a studio exec is really like. This colleague also stated that the movie did not exaggerate! While billed as a comedy, this film is anything but funny. Guy (played by Frank Whaley, a vastly underrated TV supporting actor) is a recent college graduate...

“Departures”–“Between Life and Death”

Written by diana on February 15, 2011. Posted in movie reviews, Unhealed Wound. 2 Comments on “Departures”–“Between Life and Death”

For a guest lecture I am preparing for a course, “Philosophy through the Movies”, I decided to select the Academy Award® Winner for Best Foreign Language Film of 2009, “Departures”, (Japanese title: “Okuribito”, lit. “a person sent out or dispatched”), a look into the in-between of life and death. What the Tibetan Buddhists would call “bardo”. Loosely based on Aoki Shinmon’s autobiographical book Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician (納棺夫日記 Nōkanfu Nikki), the movie opens with the main character, Daigo Kobayashi,...

“Restrepo” – Dangerously Close to the Action

Written by diana on January 24, 2011. Posted in movie reviews. 3 Comments on “Restrepo” – Dangerously Close to the Action

This haunting documentary, winner of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary, chronicles very young soldiers (some younger than twenty years old) during their fourteen-month deployment in Afghanistan’s Korengal valley. A visceral view of modern battle, you cannot watch this riveting, real-life “Hurt Locker” without having your heart pulsate, tears catch, and compassion lodge in your throat for these boys and for the Afghan villagers they do not understand. Sebastian Junger (author of A Perfect Storm) and Tim Hetherington (cinematographer) focus on a...

“The King’s Speech”—A Personal Idiom for All of Us

Written by diana on January 17, 2011. Posted in movie reviews. No Comments on “The King’s Speech”—A Personal Idiom for All of Us

This is the third of my movie reviews so far. The first movie review, “127 Hours”, and the second, “Black Swan”, are two portraits of protagonists who have a daunting obstacle to overcome. In “127 Hours” the main character has to wound himself in the most barbarous of ways to survive. In “Black Swan”, the ballerina has to face her demons in order to truly be an artist. And in “The King’s Speech”, King George VI has to overcome a debilitating stutter of humiliating proportions with a determination, dignity, and courage that can only be called heroic. After the Golden Globes awards I was...

“Black Swan”—Dancing in the In-Between

Written by diana on January 1, 2011. Posted in movie reviews. 4 Comments on “Black Swan”—Dancing in the In-Between

This spellbinding movie, routinely described as a psychological thriller, is not to everyone’s taste but I absolutely loved it: dancing around the thin membrane between a fantasy/dream world and reality. Starring Natalie Portman as Nina, the beautiful but fragile ballerina who wishes to be the prima ballerina of Swan Lake, the movie opens with a dream sequence from this famous ballet. Evil Rothbart envelops the White Swan in his arms, but Nina wakes up in her room, a child’s bedroom of stuffed animals with a classic music jewelry box of a spinning mechanical ballerina twirling around. In...

“127 Hours”: The Instinct to Survive and the Will to Live

Written by diana on December 14, 2010. Posted in movie reviews. No Comments on “127 Hours”: The Instinct to Survive and the Will to Live

My husband and I just saw the movie that brings to the screen the harrowing tale of 23 year old mountain climber Aron Ralston, who literally cuts himself loose from a boulder in a slot canyon in Blue John, a remote area of the Moab desert in Utah, the state with the most slot canyons in the world. (A slot canyon is a narrow and extremely steep canyon, formed by rushing water carving through rock.) To stay alive, Ralston resorts to his keenest survival instincts honed from rescue training in outdoor’s extreme conditions. Based on Ralston’s autobiography, Between a Rock and a Hard Place,...