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Back before the pornography industry took the wrappings and bow off the old tease and turned sexuality into carnality and corruption for the masses, bawdiness still had some humor attached to it. Burlesque offered Americans and Brits a thumb-to-the-nose challenge of those highbrow notions of respectability that we now clump together under the term “Victorian”–the…
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The reason Adam and Eve felt the need to cover themselves after the Fall had to do with what was going on in their minds; the problem was not human nakedness, nor sexuality. The problem with the display of sexuality in film likewise has to do with the mind. Nudity in a film is wrong…
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It doesn’t take an advanced degree to identify the moral decline in American popular culture. This may sound cliché, but turn on the television set and compare the current of your evening menu to what was running fifty years ago. Several years ago a friend introduced me to Reminisce monthly magazine, “a spirited celebration of America’s stories…
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Bruce Almighty2003 Universal PicturesDirected by Tom ShadyacFeaturing Jim Carrey, Jennifer Aniston, Morgan Freeman Plot: Bruce Nolan, a good, but self-centered newsman, complains bitterly to God when he is overlooked for promotion to anchorman. God responds, allowing Bruce to exercise divine powers and respond to peoples’ prayers himself. Consideration: One of the best ways to start discussing this…
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Shortly before viewing the film Precious, I happened to see a youtube video of graduating students and their scrubby friends making a shambles of a high school commencement ceremony in inner-city Milwaukee. The week before, my own grueling school year at an urban high school in Milwaukee had just come to an end. So, I…
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The Magdalene Sisters is to Irish nuns what Mommy Dearest is to Hollywood mothers. Peter Mullan’s controversial, occasionally brilliant, exposé of the horrifying trade in female flesh perpetrated in the 1970s by Catholic nuns in Ireland drags us through a series of atrocities that conjure images from Schindler’s List. Only, where the Speilberg film did…
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Arguably the best film from last year’s crop was, of course, overlooked in the Academy nominations for Best Picture. Memento, a remarkably innovative film by Christopher Nolan dazzled the crowd at its Sundance release and has won over just about everyone I know, except my eighty-nine-year-old father, who likes stories that travel neatly from point…
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There is much good in Peter Jackson’s rendition of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book of J.R.R. Tolkien’s great trilogy The Lord of the Rings. My ten-year-old son said the film was “awesome,” and from what I can tell, all his school-fellows agree. Yet, anyone who genuinely loves Tolkien’s work and understands what…
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Given the wave of mega-movies that swept over us recently – The Lord of the Rings, Blackhawk Down, and Harry Potter, to name just three – the smallness of Monster’s Ball is refreshing. The unwritten Hollywood creed used to be: Just tell a good story, tell it simply, and tell it well. No longer. The…
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Don’t be fooled by the title. I liked Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, although it leaves one as optimistic about the human condition as his other classic, Unforgiven, which left us with a “redeemed” William Munny reverted back to vigilante killer. And if your tastes run toward Oedipus the King, you may especially like Mystic River.…
