Love Is Strange Movie Review

What a beautiful little movie Ira Sachs made with Love Is Strange. Alfred Molina and John Lithgow play George and Ben, a same sex couple who get married (thanks to a change in New York law) after almost forty years together as partners. George, who works as a music educator in a private Catholic school, is fired for not upholding the values of the Church. Essentially, his marriage stands in conflict with the public image of the Church. The decision is not unlike any company firing someone for publicly engaging in a behavior that reflects poorly on company values. However, his colleagues and most of his students and their parents knew he was gay and lived with Ben.

John Cusack focus concludes with Review of Identity

It can be a really effective premise to confine your characters to a single location fort eh duration of the drama. The ancient Greeks were certainly aware of this as a narrative device. It can work best in a thriller and there are many that throw a bunch of people together for a single night and then dispatch them one by one.

James Mangold’s Identity starts eerily and mysteriously with newspaper clippings of a motel murder and voiceover recordings of a psychiatrist (Alfred Molina) talking to the alleged perpetrator. Then suddenly we’re thrust into a motel office as a man bursts in holding his bleeding wife shouting at the clerk to call an ambulance. Then in overlapping flashbacks we see the sequence of events, involving a young call girl, a limousine driver and an aging movie star, and a young boy who never speaks, that led to the accident. Because of a terrible rain storm that has washed out the road in both directions, all these characters and more wind up at the motel together.

Frida Movie Review

This review was written at the end of 2002 with the intention of publishing it on a website that no longer exists. The unusual structure is a remnant of the requirements of that site. It is published here for the first time.

Synopsis: Biopic about the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. The film chronicles her life in a series of anecdotes as she meets, falls in love with and marries fellow artist Diego Rivera. Kahlo endures a tragic accident that leaves her crippled for life. She uses the enduring pain to fuel her painting which expresses her dark and somber moods as well as the excitement she found in a life with Rivera. That excitement lasts only until she exposes his lack of fidelity and loyalty to her. Late in life, Kahlo and Rivera took in Leon Trotsky and his wife after they fled into exile in Mexico. The film suggests that an affair takes place between Kahlo and Trotsky. This becomes a way for her to hurt the man she loved and who hurt her more than the trolley accident that left her in physical pain for life.

Scoop: First I must admit that I knew next to nothing of Frida Kahlo's life or art before seeing director Julie Taymor's biopic Frida. I knew only that she was married to Diego Rivera, the Mexican artist who was a Socialist and once included a portrait of Lenin in a mural he painted in the lobby of Rockefeller Center (the mural was promptly destroyed).

Whether or not Taymor's vision of Kahlo, working from a screenplay by Gregory Nava (El Norte) and others, based on Hayden Herrera's book, is factually accurate is irrelevant. What matters is whether the material presented on screen makes for good film drama. The answer is a definitive "Yes."

Coffee and Cigarettes Movie Review

This review was first written and published in May 2004 on a website that no longer exists.

Steven Wright and Roberto Benigni enjoy coffee and cigarettes.

Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes is a series of short, comic vignettes in which the characters discuss such banalities as Elvis’s long-lost twin brother, the theories of Nikola Tesla, the effects of coffee on your dreams and the absence of any Tom Waits songs on the juke box. All of this is done in various coffee shops while the characters – that’s right – drink coffee and smoke cigarettes.

Jarmusch began this project in 1986 with the production of the first vignette, “Strange to Meet You,” starring Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright. The next two, “Twins” with Joie and Cinque Lee and Steve Buscemi and “Somewhere in California” with Tom Waits and Iggy Pop followed several years later. Then in 2004 he finally completed another eight short films to round out the themes and release all eleven as a feature film.