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...
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...
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...
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...
A Small Light–In a Very Dark World
A Small Light, a National Geographic eight-episode miniseries, chronicles the life of a young German woman in her twenties, Miep Gies (Bel Powley). Sent as a little girl by her mother to a more safe environment in Amsterdam, unaware that Amsterdam is on the verge of being overtaken by Fascism. Miep, emotionally abandoned by her family, begins work for Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber) in his pectin factory, manufacturing the essential ingredient for making jam and jelly. Soon, however, her boss will be forced to take his family into hiding from the Nazis. Bravely, Miep and her husband...
My Top 12 Movies and Series for 2023
While we are all going into our fourth year of Covid, many of us craved new content to watch, and felt like there weren’t as many good movies and series to choose from. Certainly, the screenwriters’ strike contributed to the dearth of content. Well, this year I still have twelve to recommend. Some are less well-known and under-the-radar. Also, there seemed to be more selections from DEI producers and writers, for a welcomed change!
Here are the reviews I wrote this past year with the criteria that they were available online. Of the 48 reviews I posted...