I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.
Albert Camus said, “The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.” These words become prophetic in Romanian director Cristian Mungui’s Beyond the Hills, a powerful tale of religious and emotional obsession that leads to tragic consequences. Like…
As a result of their parent’s separation, 12-year-old Koichi (Koki Maeda) lives in Kagoshima with his mother (Nene Ohtsuka) and grandparents (Kirin Kiki and Isao Hashizume) while his younger brother Ryunosuke (Oshiro Maeda) lives with his intermittently employed musician father (Jo Adigiri) in Fukuoka. Both talk to each other daily on their cell phone but…
The Andean story of how the world was created by a tall white, blue eyed man with long blond-reddish hair and beard who arose from Lake Titicaca in Bolivia has been passed down by word of mouth through generations of South American Indians. Known to the Aymaras as Viracocha (he was also called Kon-Tiki), Quetzalcoatl…
Permeated by a sense of the sacred, Terrence Malick’s latest film points us to the transience of all things. Appropriately titled To the Wonder, the film has Malick’s stamp written all over it: Philosophical voice-overs uttered in hushed tones to a haunting orchestral soundtrack, panoramic displays of the physical beauty of nature, a story that…
For scrawny 12-year old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein), life is up and down. Going up, however, does not mean moving up the ladder of success but only riding a cable car to do his “work” at the top of a mountain ski resort, a playground for wealthy tourists. Ursula Meier’s heartbreaking Sister, Switzerland’s submission for…
Set in Communist East Germany in the early 1980s, cold war paranoia is in full view in Christian Petzold’s Barbara, winner of the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale. In Barbara, Petzold has fashioned not only a superb character study but a film that illuminates the effects of oppression on the human…
Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School, published a provocative article in 2008 in the British Medical Journal, titled “Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network.” In it he states, “Happiness is more contagious than previously thought . . . Emotions have a collective existence — they are…
