The Last Movie You Saw On DVD or VHS or TV.

GHOST is really a great movie, because it has comedy, a love story, murder, and relationship about friends. I think that's the four story line in the movie.

I'm not a great fan of Swayze, but I thought he did a bang up job as the victim. Whoopi Goldberg always does a respectable acting of most of her characters and enjoyed her in this movie, and what can I say about Demi? She's one sexy woman!

c.i.- And I LOVE "4 handkerchief" films.

Me too! What is really ironic is that in real life situations, I rarely cry, but give me a 4-hankerchief show, and I'm all stick in my throat tears.

WOODY ALLEN and ME

Part 1:

Last night I watched some 75 minutes of Woody Allen: A Documentary: Part 1.(1) It is Robert B Weide's fascinating study of the multi-Oscar winning New York film-maker. Weide(1959- )is an American screenwriter, producer, and director, perhaps best known for his Emmy-winning work on documentaries including profiles of American comedian, actor, juggler and writer W.C. Fields as well as comedian Lenny Bruce.

Part 1 takes viewers from Allen’s family background and childhood up to 1980.Weide talked to Alan Yentob about making this definitive Woody Allen documentary which was first broadcast on BBC One on Tuesday 23 and Wednesday 24 July 2012. Yentob(1947-) is a British television executive and presenter. He has spent his entire career at the BBC. Weide talks with Yentob about gaining Allen's trust and getting him to talk candidly and revealingly about his life and work. I had my 68th birthday when BBC One put that documentary to air.

After trying for three decades, Weide was given the unprecedented access he wanted to make Woody Allen: A Documentary. We see Woody Allen in his childhood neighbourhood, working with Naomi Watts and Josh Brolin on set, and working at home with his 1950s Olympia Portable SM3 typewriter which he still uses for all of his writing. Weide also relates the story of Allen's idiosyncratic approach to picking his next script: trawling through scraps of paper kept in a bedside drawer, and his unusual script-editing methods.

Part 2:

Allen worked as a comedy writer in his late teens and early 20s, the 1950s, writing jokes and scripts for television and publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen began performing as a stand-up comic, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. I knew nothing of Woody Allen in the 1950s, and early ‘60s, involved as I was in: (i) my childhood and adolescence, (ii) my sport, school, family and life in a small town, and (iii) my first years in a new religion, a religion which claimed to be the newest of the Abrahamic faiths: the Baha’i Faith.

Allen's films span six decades, starting with 1965's What's New Pussycat? In the winter and spring of 1965 I was 21; I had my first orgasms; I attended my father’s funeral, worked as an abstractor for the Canadian Peace Research Institute, and was an electrician’s assistant for the Steel Company of Canada that summer. I also finished my second year at university in an honours history and philosophy program, and began an honours sociology course. In October ’65 I also made the decision to teach primary school among the Inuit on Baffin Island after graduation.

Part 3:

Allen is still going strong in 2013 at the age of 78. I don’t need to give you chapter and verse of Allen’s extensive achievements over more than 50 years. Wikipedia has an excellent summary, if you are interested. Meanwhile, the year 2013 sees me: (a) retired after a 50 year student-teaching life, 1949 to 1999;(b) reinvented from the roles of teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator, to the roles of writer and author, poet and publisher, online blogger and journalist, reader and scholar, editor and researcher, and (c) nursing several bodily ailments, but hoping to last well into my old-age, the years after 80 according to one model of human development used by psychologists.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC1 TV, 1-2 September, 11:50 p.m. to 1:45 a.m.

A lover of music and writing with
much pure joy in the process, much
self-deprecation, and much humour,
much shyness and much discomfort,
much psychoanalysis(37 years), one
more marriage, and several more of
many things than me: relationships,
children, wealth, decades of immense
creativity, fame and literary success.1
You were and are a wonder to behold,
Woody, and I thank you for your talents
and faculties, literary skills, and what you
have given to our planetary civilization!!!

1 I leave it to readers with the interest to find out more about the several aspects of Woody Allen’s life to which I refer in the above prose-poem.

Ron Price
2 September 2013

I get like that with tearjerker movies, too. We must be gettin' old.

Yes, snood, we all have a range of emotional responses to movies, to life, to people, to food, to....virtually everything.-Ron

We went to see Capt. Phillips, it's a very tense film even though you know that the merchant marine is rescued . I had to put on sunglasses as I left the cinema and immediately ducked into the rest room to repair my face. I cleaned off the raccoon mascara circles and tried to stop sobbing. A woman came in and said "you must have seen Capt.Philips, I said yes, but since I knew how it would end I thought there wouldn't be any waterworks". She was weepy as well, and she hugged me and said the US doesn't appreciate the expertise of our troops. That was special to me.

I have not seen the film, Capt. Phillips which was only released on September 28, 2013, opening the 2013 New York Film Festival. I am informed in cyberspace that the film was praised for its direction, screenplay, production values, cinematography, and the performances of Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi.

Captain Phillips received widespread critical acclaim. Film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports a 93% approval critic response based on 228 reviews, with a "Certified Fresh" and an average score of 8.3/10. The site's consensus reads: "Smart, powerfully acted, and incredibly intense, Captain Phillips offers filmgoers a Hollywood biopic done right—and offers Tom Hanks a showcase for yet another brilliant performance." Metacritic gives the film a score of 83/100 based on 48 reviews of a "Universal Acclaim".

Now for something completely different. We watched "We are the Millers", I didn't want to, because I thought it would be foolish. Well it appealed to the 14 year old girl I used to be. We laughed a lot, it was much better than I thought it would be.

That is often the way it is, glitterbag, when one watches TV.-Ron

We are heading out to see "American Hustle", it's the first time I've been out of the house since Christmas Eve. Think I've finally kicked the Bronchitis. Will provide review when we get home.

Speaking of reviews, glitterbag, here is a comment I made after seeing a recent visual delight.-Ron
----------------------------------
WOODY ALLEN and ME
Part 1:
Last night I watched some 75 minutes of Woody Allen: A Documentary: Part 1.1It is Robert B Weide's fascinating study of the multi-Oscar winning New York film-maker.Weide(1959- )is an American screenwriter, producer, and director, perhaps best known for his Emmy-winning work on documentaries including profiles of American comedian, actor, juggler and writer W.C. Fields as well as comedian Lenny Bruce.

Part 1 takes viewers from Allen’s family background and childhood up to 1980.Weide talked to Alan Yentob about making this definitive Woody Allen documentary which was first broadcast on BBC One on Tuesday 23 and Wednesday 24 July 2012. Yentob(1947-) is a British television executive and presenter. He has spent his entire career at the BBC. Weide talks with Yentob about gaining Allen's trust and getting him to talk candidly and revealingly about his life and work.I had my 68th birthday when BBC One put that documentary to air.

After trying for three decades, Weide was given the unprecedented access he wanted to make Woody Allen: A Documentary.We see Woody Allen in his childhood neighbourhood, working with Naomi Watts and Josh Brolin on set, and working at home with his 1950s Olympia Portable SM3 typewriter which he still uses for all of his writing. Weide also relates the story of Allen's idiosyncratic approach to picking his next script: trawling through scraps of paper kept in a bedside drawer, and his unusual script-editing methods.

Part 2:

Allen worked as a comedy writer in his late teens and early 20s, the 1950s, writing jokes and scripts for television and publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen began performing as a stand-up comic, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. I knew nothing of Woody Allen in the 1950s, and early ‘60s, involved as I was in: (i) my childhood and adolescence, (ii) my sport, school, family and life in a small town, and (iii) my first years in a new religion, a religion which claimed to be the newest of the Abrahamic faiths: the Baha’i Faith.

Allen's films span six decades, starting with 1965's What's New Pussycat?In the winter and spring of 1965 I was 21; I had my first orgasms; I attended my father’s funeral, worked as an abstractor for the Canadian Peace Research Institute, and was an electrician’s assistant for the Steel Company of Canada that summer. I also finished my second year at university in an honours history and philosophy program, and began an honours sociology course. In October ’65 I also made the decision to teach primary school among the Inuit on Baffin Island after graduation.

Part 3:

Allen is still going strong in 2013 at the age of 78. I don’t need to give you chapter and verse of Allen’s extensive achievements over more than 50 years.Wikipedia has an excellent summary, if you are interested. Meanwhile, the year 2013 sees me: (a) retired after a 50 year student-teaching life, 1949 to 1999;(b) reinvented from the roles of teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator, to the roles of writer and author, poet and publisher, online blogger and journalist, reader and scholar, editor and researcher, and (c) nursing several bodily ailments, but hoping to last well into my old-age, the years after 80 according to one model of human development used by psychologists.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC1 TV, 1-2 September, 11:50 p.m. to 1:45 a.m.

A lover of music and writing with
much pure joy in the process, much
self-deprecation, and much humour,
much shyness and much discomfort,
much psychoanalysis(37 years), one
more marriage, and several more of
many things than me: relationships,
children, wealth, decades of immense
creativity, fame and literary success.1
You were and are a wonder to behold,
Woody, and I thank you for your talents
and faculties, literary skills, and what you
have given to our planetary civilization!!!

1 I leave it to readers with the interest to find out more about the several aspects of Woody Allen’s life to which I refer in the above prose-poem.

Ron Price
2 September 2013

Loved American Hustle, I give it 4 WOW's

I rarely go to the movies. Quite often, a new movie for me is pretty old by most standards. I just saw China Syndrome for the first time. I had to miss a favorite series to see the ending. If I had written the film play, I would have allowed Jack Lemon's character to survive. But I did enjoy watching it.

Agreed.
I'm trying to get folks here to post their new movie theater reviews on this thread http://able2know.org/topic/121800-6#post-5544658

I'll try to do that. Thanks.-Ron

Tonight we're watching "All About Eve" on Netflix. Great classic movie!

Watching beautiful mind..John Nash story awesome!

A BEAUTIFUL MIND

Part 1:

A Beautiful Mind is a 2001 American biographical drama film based on the life of John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics. I watched the film last night, a dozen years after its opening and after it grossed some 400 million dollars. I won’t give you chapter and verse on: who wrote the screenplay and the novel on which it was based, who directed and produced it, who acted in it, and what awards it enjoyed. You can read all that in cyberspace at several sites of which Wikipedia1 was my main source.

The story is also one I only sketch here, FYI. The film begins in the early years of a young prodigy named John Nash. Early in the film, Nash begins developing paranoid schizophrenia and endures delusional episodes while painfully watching the loss and burden his condition brings on his wife and friends.

Part 2:

Like historical fiction novels, biographical film and drama cherry picks aspects from the real life of the person concerned and the society, the mise-en-scene, in which they lived. All biography and autobiography, genres I’ve been studying and writing-in for the last 30 years, cherry pick. I remember after writing the first draft of my autobiography during the years 1984 to 1993, just after I turned 40, I found the result so boring I could hardly bare reading it, and so began the next twenty years of my personal cherry-picking. Cherry-picking is not, therefore, a pejorative term; everyone has to do it as they survey their lives and try to give some sense and sensibility, context and texture, to what is often a rag-and-bone shop of everyday, quotidian reality, however moving and engrossing their life may be.

To make this film both more interesting, more entertaining and, as writers and film-makers know, more popular in the market-place a whole army of people, often called the credits, are involved. In addition, a certain poetic or literary license takes place, often unbeknownst to the casual reader or film-goer. Although this film was well received by critics, it has been criticized for its inaccurate portrayal of some aspects of Nash's life, especially his other family and a son born out of wedlock, and its treatment of paranoid schizophrenia, However, the filmmakers have stated that the film was not meant to be a literal representation.

Part 3:

The film begins in the late 1940s when John Forbes Nash, Jr.(1928-) arrives at Princeton university. Nash is an American mathematician whose works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations have provided insight into the forces that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily life. His theories are used in market economics, computing, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, accounting, politics and military theory. The film ends in 1994 when Nash, then serving as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University gets the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

In 2002, PBS produced a documentary about Nash titled A Brilliant Madness, which tells the story of this mathematical genius whose career was cut short by severe mental health problems. In his own words, he states:

″I spent times of the order of five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always attempting a legal argument for release. After I had been hospitalized long enough, I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses. I would then revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances; it was only then that I would return to my mathematical research. In these interludes of, as it were, enforced rationality, I did succeed in doing some respectable mathematical research.

Thus there came about the research for "Le problème de Cauchy pour les équations différentielles d'un fluidegénéral"; the idea that Prof. Hironaka called "the Nash blowing-up transformation"; and those of "Arc Structure of Singularities" and "Analyticity of Solutions of Implicit Function Problems with Analytic Data". After my return to the dream-like delusional hypotheses in the later 60's, I became a person of delusionally influenced thinking. My behaviour was relatively moderate, and thus tended to avoid hospitalization and the direct attention of psychiatrists.” -Ron Price with thanks to1Wikipedia, 15 October 2013.

I do love an artistic film. I know all about the cherry picking and artistic transformation ..it's a way of looking through a prism . I have read the real story of John Nash including his numerous hospitalizations often for several months. I have watched this movie many times and it remains one of my very favorites. I enjoy Ron Howard's directing.