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The Birth Tinsel & Tine!
I’d like to thank all my friends and family who were with me during the labor pains of birthing a new name for my blog. I was given some good suggestions: “Film Bites”, “Restaurant and Reels”, “Dip My Toe”, “Cinema Gastronomique”, “Cineatsta”,”Hungry Eyes” and a few others. I actually only got two enthusiastic responses to Tinsel & Tine, so I was going to go with majority rules and set about buying the domain filmbites.net, but at the checkout, I changed my mind; it just didn’t seem to have any ME in it. And blogging is all about the blogger, it’s a very narcissistic endeavor; I think that’s why there are…
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Commentary – Could This Be Love?
I enjoyed being on the Host Committee for Philadelphia Cinema Alliance’s French Film Series: La Cinematheque. The series had a little press, but mainly received good houses for all 4 films through e-mails, blogs, facebook and word of mouth! Hopefully, the series will resume next fall, and there’s an idea to do other foreign film programming throughout the year, apart from CineFest (formerly Philadelphia International Film Festival). Truthfully, I hope both companies, PCA and PFS are able to thrive in 2010 after their messy divorce is final! The last film in the series, Could This Be Love? (Je crois que je l’aime), a romantic comedy featuring two appealingly, unattractive people;…
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Commentary – The Road
Just how near is the apocalypse? My screenings last week consisted of 2012, a CGI version of the next Noah’s Art event. And Philadelphia Film’s Society’s filmadelphiaIndependent presentation of The Road, a bleak, cold look at the future after an unnamed cataclysmic occurrence on the earth. Then to top it off or seal the doom, my Bible study class focused on Matthew 24:4-28, where Jesus tells his disciples of all the end time miseries and destruction to come, “But all these things are merely the beginning of birth pangs”. One things for sure, if life continues after these “birth pangs” and its anything like The Road, then truly woe unto…
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Marco Tullio Giordana (Wild Blood)
My association with Philadelphia Cinema Alliance has once again brought me into contact with a world famous, critically-acclaimed writer/director- Marco Tullio Giordana. In Italy he is one of the most popular and well-regarded filmmakers of the last thirty years. His films such as, I cento passi (2000) Pasolini, un delitto italiano (1995) and most recently Sanguepazzo (Wild Blood) (2008) are so respected that many Universities in the US teach entire courses on Maestro Giordana’s work, both in Cinema Studies and Italian Studies. One of the characteristics of Giordana’s movies is the osmosis, the tight connection between the private history of the characters and History. His movies tell a personal story,…
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Commentary – Eden is West
I knew from the film synopsis that Eden is West was to have some comic overtones, but I still didn’t expect to enjoy it, I figured with all that talk of critically-acclaimed director, the film would be so full of deep meaning and subtext that I’d be itching for it to be over. Not so, actually it’s completely engaging, maybe not from the first scene, but as soon as Elias (Riccardo Scamarcio) washes up on the shores of a nudist resort, the film stays on a lively pace. Elias is an immigrant who along with many other of his countrymen is trying to illegally come into a new country in…
