I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.
Most recently used as the filming location for “The Martian,” the Wadi Rum (pronounced Ramm) desert in Jordan was described by actor Matt Damon as, “one of the most spectacular and beautiful places I have ever seen, and like nothing I’ve ever seen anywhere else on Earth.” It is this awe-inspiring background shot by cinematographer…
One of Europe’s most popular tourist destinations, Copenhagen, Denmark is a city of wide canals, narrow cobbled streets, and colored buildings. The city’s beauty is fully captured by cinematographer Alan Poon in Mark Raso’s debut feature Copenhagen, a film that might be described as a joint “coming-of-age” saga. It is the story of two people,…
Loosely based on Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”), Danny Boyle’s (“127 Hours”) Steve Jobs is not a conventional biopic of the famous co-founder of Apple Computers but is more like an impressionist painting — short strokes of paint that capture the essence of the subject rather than…
A poignant love story, Arnaud Desplechin’s (“Jimmy P.”) My Golden Days (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse) is filled with warmth and humor and delivered with a lively and playful touch in the Desplechin style: The use of voice-overs, split screens, the iris-effect, and characters looking and speaking directly into the camera. Challenging us with numerous…
Un Certain Regard prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival, Rams (Hrútar) is a comedy/drama where communication is a luxury until it becomes a matter of survival. Directed by Grímur Hákonarson (“Summerland”) and set in a remote village in Iceland, it is the story of two unmarried brothers, Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson, “Brave Men’s Blood”) and…
While no movie can fully capture the madness of what life in a concentration camp must have been like, László Nemes’ Cannes Grand Prize Award winning Son of Saul, his first feature film, may come close to recreating the experience. Written by the director and Clara Royer and shot in 35mm with a 4:3 aspect…
Winner of the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s (“Flight of the Red Balloon”) first film in eight years, The Assassin (Nie yin niang), may initially seem out of character for a director whose previous work has been in realistic social dramas set in a contemporary historical context. Yet it is…
