Currently browsing the "Great DVDs" category.
A Separation
Posted by Arty Chick on March 8, 2012
A Separation won the 2011 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, marking Iran’s first Academy Award ever. It was also nominated in the Best Original Screenplay category, unusual for any foreign film. While the world frets about their nuclear intentions and tension mounts, it is nice to see a fairly non-political depiction of life there. This is a film about relationships and cultures and power and truth, pretty universal themes played out on a very human scale and directed with a masterful hand.
Incendies
Posted by Arty Chick on June 17, 2011
Incendies is a French Canadian drama that was nominated for the 2011 Academy Award for Best Foreign language film and is totally deserving of the honor. Living in small town USA can be frustrating for the lag time in getting to see these films in a theater, but finally, it arrived. (Only 2 left now.)
The Adjustment Bureau
Posted by Mainstream Chick on March 3, 2011
Phew, it’s time to come down from the cinematic high horse that is AWARDS SEASON and relish in some movies that are pure escapist fun. The Adjustment Bureau is definitely one of them.
Gasland
Posted by Arty Chick on February 3, 2011
Fracking! That is what Gasland is all about. If you haven’t heard of fracking, you’ll know more than you could imagine after watching this frightening documentary. It all begins when filmmaker Josh Fox gets a notice that a gas company wants to lease the rights to extract natural gas from his pristine land in Eastern Pennsylvania. They are offering him $100,000, which is pretty enticing. So he visits a nearby town Dimock, PA to see how they are doing, since they are already an active drill site. There he sees the first evidence of the immense damage that fracking causes, most dramatically demonstrated when the residents show him that the water coming out of their kitchen faucets can be lit with a match.
Flipped DVD Giveaway
Posted by Mainstream Chick on December 3, 2010
Never heard of Flipped? That’s probably because it got a bit lost in the sea of summer sensory-overload movies. It’s a nice, sweet, simple film reminiscent of The Wonder Years television show. You can re-read Mainstream Chick’s review from August, and enter our contest to win one of five free DVDs – just in time for the holidays!
The Cove
Posted by Arty Chick on April 29, 2010
There are a lot of worthy films that I put off watching because the subject matter seems too hard to take. The Cove was at the top of my list for “must see but don’t know if I can take” movies. Winner of the 2010 Oscar for Best Documentary, its main subject is the dolphin slaughter that takes place in one small town in Japan. And I am all for stopping dolphin genocide, but sitting down for 90 minutes to watch a film about it seemed to be asking a lot.
The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)
Posted by Arty Chick on March 20, 2010
This first feature won Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck the Oscar in 2007 for Best Foreign Film and I can see why. What a wonderful film! It takes place in East Germany in 1980s and concerns a successful playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his gorgeous actress girlfriend (Martina Gedeck) who are put under surveillance by Stasi, the secret police, in order to find something to use against the writer because a high ranking minister has a thing for the actress and wants him out of the way. Their apartment is bugged and an agent is set up in the attic listening to their every conversation, taking notes, making reports. Friends come and go and anything they say may be used against them without any court of law. But it is mostly just regular old boring conversation. Then a dear friend, a talented but blacklisted director, kills himself and the writer feels compelled to say something. So he decides to write a piece for Der Spiegel in West Germany, thereby putting himself directly in the police state’s sights if they find out who wrote the piece. The article is about how the East Germans decided to stop keeping statistics on suicides.
