In fifth-century Gaul, shepherdess Astrée is willfully blind to shepherd Céladon’s chaste love and unwavering fidelity; she allows herself to become jealous by the sight of rival Semyrus pressing her lips against Céladon’s. It is Astrée who pressed Céladon to feign romance with Semyrus to deceive his parents, who loathe her (Astrée); now she tells […]
Monthly Archives: February 2009
Western Novelty, which markets “patriotic nick-knacks,” is moving its operation, including the call-center that Todd Anderson manages, from Seattle to Gharapur, a town near Mumbai, for the sake of the company’s bottom line. (Don’t stress trying to find Gharapur on a map; it’s made-up.) Todd, an American smart-aleck, must bring his replacement, Purohit N. Virajnarianan, […]
Unlike the stage play, with book by Moss Hart, music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, Hollywood’s Lady in the Dark is not so much a musical as a dramedy with lavish musical interludes. It is also one of Mitchell Leisen’s two or three best films, one that is more entertaining about Freudian […]
Joseph Weidman gave his 1937 novel I Can Get It for You Wholesale a great title, and Hollywood ran with it, attaching it to Michael Gordon’s very different film from Abraham Polonsky’s odd script. The changes in gender and ethnicity from Harry Bogen to Harriet Boyd account for some of the softening of Weidman’s book […]
Ninety-year-old Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens’s last film, which he co-wrote and co-directed with wife Marceline Loridan, is set in China. Ivens died the following year. Une histoire de vent mixes various elements, including encounters, travelogue, dreams of childhood, film allusions, conjurings of Chinese myth, as Ivens pursues his lifelong attempt to film the invisible wind—a […]
Dennis Grunes 