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 a world grown cynical, decency stands out, but often only to be mocked and abused. In Georges Bernanos’ novel The Diary of a Country Priest, a sickly, humble, and idealistic young priest pays the ultimate price for the spiritual lethargy of his parish, while Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson) in John Michael McDonagh’s brilliant…
“Whoever you are: Step out in the evening from your room where all is known to you; your house is just this side of great distances” – Rilke French Novelist Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery lies in not seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Andrzej Jakimowski’s Imagine, a film about…
In the late 1990s, Egyptian born Mohammed Atta, whom it is believed was one of the pilots of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, is reported to have established Islamist contact and formed a terrorist cell while a student in Hamburg, Germany. This fact has alerted the intelligence community in Hamburg…
The 1920’s were the culmination of the greatest wave of immigration in American history in which more than 25 million people arrived, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, to escape the aftermath of the Great War and its resulting poverty and oppression, or simply to embrace the promise of the “American Dream.” Many of these…
During the course of three years, director Jeremy Frindel traveled with Kirtan singer Jeffrey Kagel, now known to the world as Krishna Das, interviewing many of his colleagues and tapping into his strengths, not only as a Grammy Award winning singer, but also as a teacher, healer, and a man of depth and compassion. The…
Anticipating the appearance of Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt), a prominent food critic, Carl Casper (Jon Favreau), a respected chef at a popular restaurant in Los Angeles, wants to add some innovations to the restaurant’s tried and true menu. Riva (Dustin Hoffman), the bistro owner, however, tells him to stick to what has always worked, a…
If you pay attention to nutrition labels on the food products you buy, you may notice that next to the number of grams of sugar, there is no percentage shown. The sugar industry made sure of that. What they don’t want consumers to know is that the sugar content of many of their products is…
