Beyond Silence
(Jenseits der Stille) 1996 104 minutes
When the film opens, Lara is a third grader and maybe the most
attractive young girl any of us will ever see.
Both of her parents are totally deaf and rely on her heavily for
communicating with teachers and others.
Lara takes advantage of their inability to hear to bend things her
way. Lara is not doing very well in
school, but after her aunt gives her a clarinet, things improve. We move to when Lara is 18, living in Berlin,
writing her own music and, at the urging of her aunt, is preparing for the
examination to get into a conservatory.
A second story line is Lara’s relationship wither her father, who has
trouble with personal relations. They
are devoted to each other but Lara resents the fact that he can’t hear and
appreciate her music and that in general she doesn’t get the signs of approval
from him that her friends get from their hearing parents. A few days before the exam, she gets word
that her mother has been killed in a bicycle accident. She goes home for the funeral and afterwards
has a row with her father before she returns to Berlin. Her father shows up for her exam and they
reconcile. We see her play and we see
the faces of the judges. There is no
announcement of the result before the screen goes black, but it’s clear she
passed. A beautiful film.
.
Dr. Strangelove 1964
95 minutes I hadn’t seen this
since 1964 and had forgotten almost everything except Slim Pickens riding the H
bomb and Sterling Hayden, the crazy general, worrying about pollution of his
precious bodily fluids. The real fun is
Peter Sellers playing three roles: a
British officer seconded to Hayden, the US President and Dr. Strangelove, a mad
former Nazi scientist employed as an advisor at DOD. The cast includes everyone you ever heard of
plus someone named Glenn Beck. It can’t
be the same one, but if it were he could have done the mad Nazi scientist role.
.
The Hobbit: The
Desolation of Smaug 2013 161 minutes
This is the second installment of Bilbo Baggin’s adventures in Middle
Earth, which looks a lot like New Zealand.
There’s plenty of fantasy, including the elves and some giant spiders, but
it would be worth seeing the film just for the scenery. Smaug is one formidable dragon and there is
as battle royal as Bilbo and 11 of the 13 dwarfs try kill him with molten
metal. The film ends with Smaug flying
off to burn the town from which the dwarfs staged their raid into his cave. Martin Freeman AKA Dr. Watson plays Bilbo and
I think Benedict Cumberpatch was the head elf and the voice of the dragon. I wonder if the Brits could make a movie
without Cumberpatch.
.
You Kill Me 2007
92 minutes I watched this on
Netflix Instant View because it had Ben Kingsley. He plays an alcoholic hit man for a Polish
gang in Buffalo. When he blows an
assignment because he’s drunk and falls asleep, the boss sends him to San
Francisco to dry out. He goes to his AA
meetings and does his job at a funeral home.
While preparing a corpse for a viewing, he meets a woman played most
capably by Tea Leone. They seem to need
each other, and she doesn’t seem to mind that he kills people for a
living. When his boss is gunned down by
a rival gang, Tea helps him even the score and then they return to San
Francisco to live happily ever after
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