Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Movie watching is out-stripping movie reviewing, even movie remembering. The only solution is a list, before everything dissolves away. Ida (2013) is about a Polish novitiate who discovers from her only living relative that she is Jewish. The film is directed by Pawel Pawlikowski and stars Agata Trzebuchowska as Anna/Ida, and Agata Kulesza as Wanda, her free-living, depressed aunt. Beautiful cinematography. Absorbing narrative, except for the rather facile ending. In Cloudburst (2011), two old lesbians escape to Canada to get married. They pick up a young male drifter and teach him a few valuable life lessons. Written and directed by Thom Fitzgerald, the movie stars Olympia Dukakis as Stella and Brenda Fricker as Dot. Ryan Doucette is the young hitchhiker with the symbolic name of Prentice. Heartwarming and convincing. Guy and I watched Love Is Strange (2014) at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. After Ben and George got married, George is fired from his teaching job. Both have t...

It was gripping theater, this play about Mark Rothko and his decision to pull out of the prestigious commission of muralling the fancy Four Seasons restaurant. Plenty of art talk, between Rothko, played by a tremendous Alfred Molina, and his studio assistant Ken, the young Eddie Redmayne who more than held his own against the older actor. But the art talk was so impassioned and so well-written that one was convinced, no, convicted, that art mattered to these men more than anything else in their lives. If red represented to Rothko life and passion, black symbolized death. But this obvious symbolism was challenged by his assistant, and Rothko revealed his actual fear, to be measured and found wanting. If I have a quibble, it is that the character of Rothko could have been delineated more individually. At some points in the play, Rothko spoke as the Artist and little else. Ken, on the other hand, remained painfully and awkwardly human throughout. Redmayne brought out the vulnerability a...