I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.
For 350 years, Spain built a vast empire in South America based on the labor and exploitation of the Indian population, forcing them to accept Christianity while decimating their culture, religion, and even their language. In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, “rubber barons” rounded up all the Indians and forced them to tap…
“For if the darkness and corruption leave a vestige of the thoughts that once we had. Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad” — Christina Rossetti CalArts Professor and film essayist Thom Andersen, acclaimed for his 2003 documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” has brought his latest…
There are more coming-of-age films than masterpieces in the Louvre, but there are only a handful of them that have stood the test of time, even though teen-speak changes over the years. First-time Canadian director Andrew Cividino’s Sleeping Giant, an update of the short that won the youth jury prize at Locarno International Film Festival…
“Life can be tragic, but let’s not snivel” — Gustav Mahler Alix Delaporte’s (“Angel & Tony”) The Last Hammer Blow (Le dernier coup de marteau) is the story of 14-year Victor (Romain Paul, in an outstanding debut performance that earned him the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor at the Venice Film Festival) who…
William Shakespeare wrote (Sonnet 116), “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.” Though Shakespeare would not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds, Kate and Geoff Mercer in Andrew…
Gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Republican and Democratic national conventions was still being offered by CBS and NBC in 1968, but ABC, lacking their resources, limited their coverage to a few hours in the evening and highlighted it with a ten-night debate between conservative author and commentator William F. Buckley Jr. and flamboyant liberal novelist and…
In 1933, Jimmy Gralton (Barry Ward, “Blood Cells”) became the only Irish citizen ever to have been deported from Ireland when he was exiled to America without a trial. His crime seems to be that he was a Communist who incurred the ire of the Catholic Church and the landlords by daring to establish a…
