“The Magdalene Sisters” takes place on 1964, the heels of the women’s liberation front where young women realized their sexuality and did so through protest, standing up for their rights, and burning their bras showing they wouldn’t be constricted sexually through man made products, yet here we visit a village in Ireland where women’s liberation hasn’t quite caught up. If anything “The Magdalene Sisters”, a well acted and very well directed film, analyzes the constriction of women in Ireland and how utterly one – dimensional their values were. It’s more of a film centered completely around ignorance and not only about religious ignorance, but social ignorance, and paranoia that the slightest thing will destroy the religious function and faith.
Tag Archives: Adaptation
Runaway Jury (2003)
“Runaway Jury” is the type of film that makes me happy to be such a hardcore movie fan, beautiful cast, well acted, well directed, and taut, this is a prime courtroom thriller. Based on the book by John Grisham whose name has become synonymous with courtroom dramas, rather than focusing solely on the drama in the courtroom, we also focus on the people behind the curtain, the defense and the prosecution who pick jurors one by one and decide which would be most suitable. The difference in this process are the two people behind it; Wendell Rohr and Rankin Fitch played by heavyweights Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman, Rohr (Hoffman) is a fiercely moral lawyer who plays by the rules along with his newest assistant Lawrence Green (Jeremy Piven) who can read body language and voice tones, he gets his job by convincing Rohr he’ll be needed during this trial if he intends on winning and defeating Fitch.
Sylvia (2003)
While Paltrow does manage to give an inspired performance that shows effort, the problem with “Sylvia” is it romanticizes someone who was obviously stricken with a horrible mental disability. As always, poets and singers who manage to commit suicide are portrayed as people who have done something elegant, a deed such as suicide is portrayed here with such a fantastic and dreamy nature and never does it focus on the sheer extreme results such as misery. This manages to romanticize suicide and takes a woman who had obviously a mental illness and makes her seem as if suicide was a grand gesture to end her misery when in fact it was just sad.
Shattered Glass (2003)
“Shattered Glass” is the fact based drama about the newspaper “The New Republic”, a small time barely known news magazine for Washington that offered news articles about world events and finance. The magazine, while struggling, did have a flourishing and passionate staff of reporters and journalists, one of them being Stephen Glass, a young likable reporter who always has a new story, during meetings, he pitches to the editors which always goes to print. “Shattered Glass” is based on the real events that occurred in 1995 – 98 in which reporter Stephen Glass was discovered to have been fabricating articles over a long period of his career.
In America (2003)
“In America” has a quality that isn’t seen in movies these days. It’s sappy but in the other hand it’s very genuine to the point where sappy is most welcome, it has a distinctly large knack for being so utterly convincing in its charm, grace and celebration of life. Surely that is what I’d best sum it up as: a celebration of life, and food for the soul and the heart. This is a film a family should watch together as we watch another family cope with what they have and with the cards they’ve been dealt in life. “In America” is the tale of the American dream that no one can grasp showing that the American dream is only that: a dream, a concept, something to reach for, and “In America” tells us that the American dream is something that’s in the eyes of the beholder. In this semi-modern tale, we meet an Irish family who trek to New York under the guise that they’re on vacation when really they’re there to live there.
Chernobyl Heart (2003)
On April 25th and 26th, 1986 the worst nuclear power accident in the world, and in history occurred at Chernobyl in the Ukraine (formerly the USSR). The Chernobyl nuclear power plant located had 4 reactors and while testing reactor number 4 numerous safety procedures were disregarded. At 1:23am the chain reaction in the reactor became out of control creating explosions and a fireball which blew off the reactor’s heavy steel and concrete lid. Thus the Chernobyl accident killed more than 30 people immediately, and as a result of the high radiation levels in the surrounding 20-mile radius, 135,00 people had to be evacuated, a lot of the cleaning workers who came to fix the accident died quickly, and some in a matter of years due to the immense amount of radiation they’d received while cleaning, but Chernobyl left a lasting legacy with the accident, a legacy within the city’s children.
Hellboy (2004)
Prolific director Guillermo Del Toro who penned the previous comic film “Blade 2” and the cult psychological horror film “The Devil’s Backbone” gives some competent direction in this adaptation of the hit comic book. A young agent John T. Meyers is recruited into the ranks of Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense Facility, he’s signed on to mentor their primary weapon of choice. Given a tour of the facilities gazing on to Abe Sapien a very intelligent reptilian sea creature, he’s assigned to take care of Hellboy. Discovered as a child during World War 2 during a raid on the Nazis, he was summoned to Earth to become the evil Rasputin’s child and eventual ruler of Earth, but when US soldiers discovered him, professor Broom took him in to reform him and he became Earth’s greatest protector using his powers for evil to protect humanity.