Recently I posted a piece about “beauty” and asked if my readers had some thoughts on the subject. I did receive a few in email and comments, but not a lot. I was…
Category:
FILM & CINEMA
In the final scene of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (1990), Paul Bowles, the author of the original story is seated in a Tangier café where he greets Kit Moresby…
I probably come off as a bit of a pest with my insistence to my grandchildren that they need to read more books (and write more, but that’s a subject…
There were seven screenwriters on Casablanca. Chances are that at least one of them had a romantic experience in Paris that resulted in Bogart’s doleful line to Bergman that “we…
[This concludes the Cinema China series] Chinese often viewed America as the jin shan, “Gold Mountain,” the name given by the Chinese to western regions of North America, particularly California, but…
Counter-Revolutionary Cinema China seems to live up to the axiom that the only constant is change. 1949 brought a big change indeed; but a political ideology hooked to the notion…
Lost passage from Genesis: Gen 2.0: And God felt that his computer had crashed when the humans he had created from his animation program had gone all crazy killing one…
2014: I used to ask my grad students in my seminars that, if they could time travel, would they prefer going into the future, or the past. Then I would…
[continued from 88.3] The rather odd story of Western heroism in the face if the Japanese conquest of Nanking is recounted in John Rabe, the true story of the German businessman…
The Enduring Revolution The essence of drama is conflict, and China’s conflicted 20th C plays out like a dysfunctional family saga compounded by uninvited foreign guests with bad personal habits:…