cyberhobo

There are lots of movies about beautiful, damaged people trying to have relationships. It usually works. The beautiful people are fun to look at, and we can relate to the relationship troubles. This film plays the theme even more effectively by downplaying the beautifulness of the characters a bit, and putting them in a palpably…

The powerful symbol of the carnival freak is put to some new uses in an original novel. Instead of presenting the freaks as suffering from exploitation, they form a fairly shocking value system of their own that holds our surrounding cultural values in contempt. It’s completely believable, because the characters depend on their freakishness for…

A nice disturbing twist to the standard student/teacher affair story. Judi Dench is great as usual. The only downside is that I didn’t find the student character entirely believable. Otherwise it’s done well. That’s about all I can say without spoiling it.

I like the storytelling technique of setting up a cliché, then exposing the cliché as a sham. This is a movie takes down a bunch of them: the irredeemable junkie, the heroic schoolteacher, the drug-dealing thug, the poor but bright student, and the list goes on. Mostly the reality exposed is grim, but the film…

Husband and wife performers are always interesting to watch, knowing that we see the public face of a relationship that continues offstage. I had heard of violinist and conductor Pinchas Zukerman, but not his cellist wife Amanda Forsyth. We begin with only Pinchas conducting Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, a piece whose hushed intensity was…