I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.
In German director Thor Freudenthal’s (“Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters”) deeply-moving Words on Bathroom Walls, high-school student Adam Petrazelli (Charlie Plummer, “All the Money in the World”) lives in a world without silence. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, the voices in his head never stop, interfering with his ability to function and endangering his need to graduate…
“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so” — John Donne For thousands of families in every part of the world, 2020 was a year of grief. During that year, many people lost those closest to them: Mothers and fathers, grandparents, siblings, as well as friends…
“The real voyage of discovery lies in not seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes” — Marcel Proust Taking risks and taking responsibility can be two sides of the same coin but never seem to mesh in Thomas Vinterberg’s (“Far from the Madding Crowd”) comedy-drama Another Round, Denmark’s submission for Best Foreign Film at…
“The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right!” — William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5 According to the United States Sentencing Commission, the incarceration rate for blacks in the U.S. is over five times higher than whites. In addition, Black male offenders receive sentences…
On June 6, 1982, exactly 38 years after D-Day, roughly 60,000 Israeli troops and more than 800 tanks, heavily supported by aircraft, attack helicopters, artillery, and missile boats invaded Southern Lebanon, a country already involved in a decades-long civil war. Israel’s publicly-stated objective was to push PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) forces back 40 kilometers (25…
The second of his 12 plays dramatizing the Black experience in America during the twentieth century, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a haunting and powerful experience that focuses on Gertrude “Ma Rainey” (Viola Davis, “Widows”), known as “The Mother of the Blues,” one of the first popular Black blues singers to gain acceptance…
“Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange” — William Shakespeare, “The Tempest” Film critic Roger Ebert once said, “All good art is about something deeper than it admits.” On the surface, Sofia Coppola’s (“The Beguiled”) On the Rocks is a light comedy about a…
