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Highlight: American Promise
Have you heard about this doc – AMERICAN PROMISE ? It’s an emotional tale about race, class and the exclusive struggles that black boys in America must endure when attempting to achieve academically. The film intimately chronicles the lives of Idris Brewster and Seun Summers, a pair of middle-class African-American male students trying to navigate one of the nation’s most prestigious schools from kindergarten to graduation. Storytellers (parents) Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson, both first generation college graduates, have been traveling the country speaking about the labor of love that won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award in 2013 at the Sundance Film Festival. “We both have come to understand…
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You Said a Mouthful Gleiberman – 12 YEARS A SLAVE
by Le Anne Lindsay, Editor Normally, I try to only read interviews and behind the scenes info before writing my reviews, and leave reading other’s reviews til after, so as not to taint my originality. I should have kept to that policy, because now that I’ve read Owen Gleiberman’s CNN Entertainment/ EW.com review on the Steve McQueen much anticipated movie 12 Years A Slave, I feel I should just write my agreement to every word Gleiberman offers; words my heart were crying to write, but would never have been so eloquently expressed: Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave is an agonizingly magnificent movie: the first great big-screen dramatization of slavery.…
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The Philadelphia Film Festival Award Winning Films (#PFF22)
Last night I attended The Philadelphia Film Festival Closing Night film, Jason Reitman’s Labor Day – Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin have a tremendous amount of chemistry in this movie (review to be included in my #PFF22 round up). As usual, I didn’t see any of the award winning films. The Philadelphia Film Society is showing them all again today, Saturday 10/26 and tomorrow Sunday 10/27. So, I will see Vic +Flo Saw a Bear, but I’ve got too much else on my plate this weekend to see any of the others. Would love your comments on any of the winning films listed below or anything you saw during the…
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Philadelphia Film Festival NEBRASKA (#PFF22)
My food n film red carpet question to director Alexander Payne – “Since Nebraska is a road trip movie, are there any great scenes that take place in a diner along the way?” Payne replied, he’s a big foodie as attested to in both Sideways and The Descendants, but no such scenes take place in Nebraska due to the stark aesthetic and lack of good eats in this Mid Western part of the country. Besides the movie is shot in black and white, not the best for filming cuisine. I feel “Nebraska” is a film that takes a while to become engaging. Although this was partly due to the…
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Greater Filmadelphia: THE SUSPECT (#PFF22)
by Le Anne Lindsay, Editor Most of the films I screen during the 22nd Annual Philadelphia Film Festival will be included in one round-up post at the end of the festival, however, The Suspect, having been made in Philadelphia by first time director Stuart Connelly, deserves its own post, for that reason, and because of the subject matter of race. We’ve been examining race history, racial bias and racial profiling a lot in films lately – Django Unchained, Fruitvale Station, The Butler, 12 Years A Slave, rightly so in the face of what’s happening in politics – so much of the opposition President Obama faces is not because he’s a…
