This was the first Ingman Bergman film I’ve ever seen and he pulls no emotional punches. This is a complicated movie about complicated lives. At times I loved the characters, at times I hated them, at no point did I forget that they were living in the 70s and their wardrobe was awesome.

Another Kurosawa masterpiece, in this case starring a citizen of my favorite ex-nation Tuva. I have great respect for a filmmaker that is crazy enough to take a huge crew and make a vast, sweeping film in a enormous country, spanning multiple seasons, and still manage to capture the tenderness of the relationship between Dersu and the Captain. Still manage to capture the delicate longing for the untamed wild and the sorrow for its loss shared by those two men. My heart broke when the Captain turned on the snowy hillside to call out “Dersuuu” and was met with the reply “Capitaaan!”

Hey, here’s the crazy project that’s been consuming the last year and a half of my life:

How handy that it can be embedded right into my blog. At some point we’ll fix the URL clicking, but for now you can check it out for reals at www.whirled.com.

Nothing like some jovial legal humor from 1949. To its credit, I don’t recall ever seeing a film from that period that so directly tackled women’s rights. My intuition is that this quote captured the general consensus of the time:

Hepburn: Do you believe that women should be treated equally in matters of the law?
Potential Juror: I should say not!

A mostly solid thriller that managed to indulge in cliche and unbelievability only occasionally. Incidentally, this was my first iTunes music rental and I am happy to report that the service is quite nice. It could do with a better selection, but I look forward to Apple ushering in an actually usable world of movies on demand after years technical possibility being expertly ignored or squandered by companies in a position to actually offer such a service.

A delightful and wacky story that nicely flavored the rich meat of puzzling goodness. It could have been more challenging, but that may have interrupted the satisfying flow from puzzle to puzzle which set an appropriate pace for the unfolding narrative.

Wow, this film was intense. It’s a rare thing to see a film about the realities of abortion, let alone one set in an oppressive communist society where it has been criminalized in an attempt to raise the birth rate. The portrayal of 1980s Romania was fascinating. It gave the film a gritty matter of factness that strangely amplified both the sense of danger and the feeling of mundanity.