I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.
If your children suggest that you operate within “your zone of resiliency,” you might want to look into what soap opera they’ve been watching, or whether they have gotten their hands on a convoluted movie script, the sort readily available in Mike Mills (“20th Century Women”) C’mon C’mon, a film inspired by Mills’ relationship with…
Successfully following up on an Oscar-winning documentary is not an easy task, but directors E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (“Free Solo”) more than accomplish that with The Rescue, the tension-filled story of the rescue of 12 young soccer players, ages 10-16, and their coach trapped in the Tham Luang Nag Non cave in Northern…
“And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning” — Wilfred Owen, “Dulce Et Decorum Est” The lives of World War I English poets Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden (“Dunkirk”) and Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson, “Making Noise Quietly”)…
“Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration – how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?” – Rebecca Solnit British Poet Percy Bysse Shelley said, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar…
Quoting the statistic that 152 million children in the world are forced to work to support their families, Iranian director Majid Majidi’s Sun Children focuses on the street kids of Tehran — children of absent, addicted, or unemployed refugee parents, forced to sell trinkets on trains or buses, work in jobs that require manual labor…
Edoardo Ponti (“Coming & Going”) has provided his mother, the great Sophia Loren (“Nine”), with her ninety-eighth film credit and her first starring role in 16 years in The Life Ahead (La vita davanti a sé), a sincere if somewhat flawed look at the relationship between an orphaned Muslim boy from Senegal and an aging…
“I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and the world drops dead” — Sylvia Plath, from “Mad Girl’s Love Song” As the popular classical French love song “Plaisir d’Amour” says: “The joys of love are but a moment long. The pain of…
