I don't remember what prompted this particular journey around the web, but I happened onto a very thoughtful article the other day about what continues to be one of my favorite films, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. You can read the article here, if you like. After finishing this reflection, I turned as I often do to Roger Ebert's website, where I found not only his four-star review, but also a similarly meditative journal entry about the film, which I wasted no time reading. Two very … [Read more...] about No Words for Tree of Life
Movies
Who Doesn’t Love A Good Magic Trick?
There's a reason I call this blog "Exploring the Magic of Movies", and I suppose it has more to do with how I watch movies than the movies themselves, at least these days. In the early days of cinema, moving pictures truly looked like some kind of wizardry, and if you saw Martin Scorsese's Hugo a couple of years ago, you might have noticed the bit where audience members watching one of the first movies got up out of their seats and ran away in terror at the shot of an oncoming train. [youtube … [Read more...] about Who Doesn’t Love A Good Magic Trick?
What’s “Great” About Gatsby?
I came to the blog today hoping to sketch out a bit of musing about an interesting Romanian film I saw last night at the Art, but on my morning meanderings I stumbled onto a friend's blog and read an absolutely fantastic review of Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Now I'll admit, I haven't seen this yet, mostly because with the last couple of Luhrmann films I saw, I had to take a couple of runs at them before I could actually sit through and enjoy them. Okay, okay, I didn't ever … [Read more...] about What’s “Great” About Gatsby?
An Epiphany About Bambi’s Mother (and Other Notable Deaths by Disney)
I think I've finally answered that nagging question that runs through my brain from time to time, namely: why is it that so many Disney characters have dead family members? If these are fairy tales created for children, why is there so darned much death? I suppose the first and most obvious answer to the question would be that Disney based his movies on fairy tales, which themselves were at times quite dark and had plenty of death in them, but it's not as though those stories were followed … [Read more...] about An Epiphany About Bambi’s Mother (and Other Notable Deaths by Disney)
What Do You Want From Iron Man?
For the last week or so, I've been meaning to get over here and give my two cents regarding Iron Man 3. I'll start off by saying that although I used to read comics when I was a kid, I was more of a DC fan than Marvel, and so didn't follow the Iron Man stories too closely. But at midnight on opening night of Iron Man 3, my husband and I -- along with a fair number of friends we ran into -- christened our brand-spanking-new IMAX theater with this movie, and it was nothing short of a blast! This … [Read more...] about What Do You Want From Iron Man?
Miss The Raven? Nevermore!
Months ago, I was lamenting the fact that I had somehow missed John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe in The Raven, due to its seemingly short stay in the theaters. This past weekend, I finally remedied that. If you've read my blog before, you may remember that in lieu of the latest Cusack film, I spent some time watching another Poe-centric film, The Black Cat. The feel of that movie was, I think, what viewers were hoping to see in The Raven, although sadly, that's not what we got at all. The Black … [Read more...] about Miss The Raven? Nevermore!