Movies, Drama
I have confessed more than once that I don’t like boxing. This is the first movie in which boxing is not pointless trashing of human beings. The true life story of Cinderella Man captures America during the great depression era and represents Hollywood at its best. The cinematography is superb: you feel like being in the ring yourself, fighting for your own survival. Paul Giamatti is in the running for an Oscar as best supporting actor. To prepare you for why the boxer Jim Braddock was called “Cinderella Man”, I attach the text of the fairy tale Cinderella recorded from a German oral tradition by the brothers Grimm who also put out the first German language dictionary.Cinderella Man
Movies, Drama
The word that arrived at my doorsteps about the HBO miniseries Angels in America was: fantastic. I knew Al Pacino and Meryl Streep were among the cast, but I had no idea what the miniseries was about. This gave me a most pleasant of surprises watching the first of the six episodes. The teleplay was so powerful that I suspected the film had to be based on a play. I was correct. For very good reasons Tony Kushner won a Pulitzer Prize for the play Angels in America. The second and third episode were disappointments given the high bar the first episode had set. Episode 4 and 5 were again much better but final one again suffered from a lack of discipline and a good editing job.Angels in America
Movies, Drama
I toyed with the idea of watching the remake of this 1962 film that came out last year with Denzel Washington in the lead. Having had bad experiences with remakes, I decided to see the original film instead. Frank Sinatra not only owned the rights to the film but also played a main role. The plot line is simple: The Russians capture an American soldier in Korea, brain wash him, and send him back to America to carry out missions that would help the Soviet cause. Altough we can still detect the tensions of the cold war lurking in the background, the narrative is initiallly much too slow for the contemporary viewer. In the middle the film—almost surprisingly—gets back on track. Freud was clearly at the peak of his influence when the script was put together: at the center of the personal and political drama is the relationship between mother and son who hate each other. The Manchurian Candidate is not a film you have to see.The Manchurian Candidate
Movies, Drama
The film highlights powerfully that in the European and American mind a black African life is worth less than a white life. A catastrophy that kills 500 Europeans is emotionally judged to be worse than the killing of 500,000 Africans. The latter event hardly makes the news. Don Cheadle stars in the true-life story of Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who housed over a thousand Tutsis refugees during their struggle against the Hutu militia in Rwanda. The acting is spotty. Cheadle is superb, but Nick Nolte, for example, delivers a ghastly performance as an UN colonel. Roman Polanksi directed The Pianist with a sure hand, showing the right amount of cruelty and brutality to neither trivialize the suffering portrayed in the movie nor to numb the viewer. The ending of Hotel Rwanda trivializes everything you witnessed earlier.Hotel Rwanda
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