My cousin just posted this on Facebook noting that this generation and those to come will never know the thrill of renting a video at Blockbuster. Technology develops so fast. Technology is so disposable but memories can last forever. Yet, if I go by what I learned in Pixar’s “Inside Out,” it’s not worth making technology memories “core memories” – because they are here today, gone tomorrow. Pixar’s next film should be called “Gone with the Wind Redux.”... Read more
This comprehensive and compact docudrama premiering tonight on PBS (10pm), “1913: Seeds of Conflict” reveals little known facts that conflated to become what writer/director Ben Loeterman proposes as the root causes for today’s ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinians. Almost a half million Muslims, 60,000 Christians and 20,000 Sephardic (i.e. Mediterranean) Jews lived together peacefully enough in the years before World War I when Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire and ruled by Ottoman law. Then with the... Read more
As news of the terrible shootings at the AME Church in Charleston, S.C., broke Wednesday, a couple hundred people were gathered at the Landmark Theater on Pico Blvd. in Los Angeles for the premiere of the documentary film “Batkid Begins.” “Batkid Begins” is the epitome of what a great community that America can be and is, the antithesis of the havoc a lone mass shooter wreaked on a group of people studying the Bible in their church. “Batkid” is Miles... Read more
Below is the feature article I wrote on the science and philosophy in “Jurassic World” but I want to add a couple of things. First, the engineering science of Dallas Bryce Howard’s high heeled shoes ought to have been mentioned. She wore them throughout and I think she even walked backwards sometimes. This feat defied nature. I would have mentioned the dinosaur brain science but I was not able to hear everything that Professor Horner said about this at... Read more
“Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith” By Angela Alaimo O’Donnell Liturgical Press, 2015 Paperback, 138 pages $12.95 My copy of “Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith” by Fordham University English professor Angela Alaimo O’Donnell arrived a few days ago and I just finished devouring it. It’s part of the “People of God” series published by Liturgical Press. After a read of the scholarly and analytical Introduction and Chapter One, the book takes flight and sails through the life... Read more
This documentary from Germany explores the dilemma of censorship about a cache of about 40 Nazi feature films (out of 1200 made between 1933 and 1944) that are not available to the German public to see. It will be shown in Los Angeles June 1 and 2 at six Laemmle Theaters. The description from the Telluride Film Festival catalog says: “Twelve hundred feature films were made in Germany’s Third Reich. According to experts, some 100 of these were... Read more
Ray (Dwayne Johnson) is a Los Angeles firefighter who heads a team of helicopter rescuers. Not long after saving a girl whose car is resting on a canyon cliff, the world seems about to end: San Andreas, Calif.’s main north-south earthquake fault line is triggered by a series of quakes around Hoover Dam in Nevada. But Ray’s world is already fragile because of a pending divorce from his wife, Emma (Carla Gugino), and the earlier death of one of his... Read more
In 1899, when deaf and blind Marie Heurtin is 14 years old, her loving father brings her from the family farm to the Larnay Institute near Poitiers, France, run by the Daughters of Wisdom. The young girl, played by Ariana Rivoire in the film “Marie’s Story,” extends her face and hands to the warm sun as they ride in the wagon. Marie hugs her father. She is at peace. The sisters at the institute are either deaf or hearing, and... Read more
If you watch the slick TV commercials BP is rolling out these days for the fifth anniversary of the BP oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon on April 20, 2010, you’d think all was well. But you cannot fool award-winning documentary filmmaker Margaret Brown. Her one-hour tour of the Louisiana, Alabama and Texas coast, “The Great Invisible,” shows us the lasting change wrought on people, land, and sea by the impact of the worst environmental calamity in U.S. history.... Read more
The rapture is coming — again. A new television series, “The Messengers,” premieres at 9 p.m./8 p.m. Central today, April 17, on The CW because “the wheels of Revelation have begun to turn.” The end is near, and “angels” or Messengers, have appeared. The Messengers are five select people, men and women, unknown to the others, who are gifted with the ability to heal others. Then there is “The Man” (Diogo Morgado), who wields death and destruction even though... Read more
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