by Richard Subber | Jan 30, 2024 | Human Nature, Reflections, Theater and play reviews
getting there…
Movie review:
To Serve Them All My Days
There is an utterly familiar plot line in To Serve Them All My Days (TV mini series, 1980-1981, 11 hours, 13 minutes): a Welsh coal miner’s son survives World War I, and becomes a teacher at a boys’ school in England south of Wales, and grows in his role to become the beloved avuncular headmaster.
John Duttine energetically plays the protagonist, David Powlett-Jones. Everyone calls him “P. J.” or “Pow-Wow,” with love and respect.
P. J. quite remarkably discovers that his calling, his life’s work, is with the faculty and boys at Bamfylde School. He judges everything from this perspective.
Much of the tale is an unfamiliarly rich creation of manifestly human characters who deal with the slings and arrows of life, and make the best of their worlds to give willing, deserving boys a good education and a glimpse of how to live a decent life.
The dialogue is above average in many scenes, and you will get inside the minds of the key players. There is enough reflection and imagination and longing and joy/despair for any discerning viewer.
No spoiler alert is needed here. You can’t possibly be in doubt about how the story ends.
In this story, getting there is the point of the journey.
Based on the 1973 novel (same title) by R. F. Delderfield.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Snow Goose
…it’s sensual drama, eminently poetic…
by Paul Gallico
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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jan 9, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading
a sustaining emotional roadmap…
Book review:
The Woman at the Washington Zoo:
Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate
by Marjorie Williams (1958-2005)
Timothy Noah, ed.
New York: PublicAffairs, Perseus Books Group, 2005
358 pages
I wish I had known about Marjorie Williams’ work when she was an active staff writer at The Washington Post.
She had a pungent, penetrating style, and she carefully offered reasoned judgment as well as what we can nostalgically think of today as “facts.”
In The Woman at the Washington Zoo, her personal memoirs about her life and her cancer are wholly human, and they remain as a sustaining emotional roadmap for an engaged reader.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
“…and dipped in folly…”
only Poe knows how to say it…
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jan 4, 2024 | Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
you have to sweat this one…
Movie review:
Norma Rae
1979
Rated PG
114 minutes
Not too many movies make you really feel like you’re sweating. Or really crying.
Norma Rae is one of the good ones. It’s hot and dirty work putting a union into a textile mill in North Carolina in the 1970s.
Sally Field was 33 years old when she played the “Go union!” gal in Norma Rae, and she puts all her photogenic energy into the role. She won the Oscar for Best Actress.
Ron Leibman is Reuben Warshowsky, the New York union guy who leads the way to sweating out the vote right down to the inevitable victory, and falls for Norma in a completely gentlemanly way.
Sad to say, Norma and Reuben lose the big prize: in their last minutes together, in a remarkably well-scripted exchange of halting words and gushing emotion, neither of these big talkers has the courage to say what is so obviously in their hearts.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
–
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Dec 5, 2023 | Human Nature, Language, Reflections, Theater and play reviews
losing sight of right and wrong…
Movie review:
Dangerous Liaisons
Dangerous Liaisons (1988, rated R, 119 minutes) is not a garden of delight.
If you aspire to a working understanding of good and evil, you could do worse than listen to the riveting chatter of the leading personae: the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) and the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich). They choose each word with careful, deliciously ribald, austerely cruel, and domineering intent.
This is a boundless exposé of the worst elements—of human intrigue, self indulgence, hubris, vaunting egos, and careless poaching of souls—that masquerade as amour.
Dangerous Liaisons is an ultimately degraded experience for both the characters and viewers, who must condemn the marquise and the vicomte for so many lives destroyed…death is an anticlimax in Dangerous Liaisons.
The marquise and the vicomte are burdened with a moral framework that shuns the absolute—they have unimaginably unsatisfied desires, and no intellectual imperative of right and wrong.
They swirl through their lives, casually jousting with each other as they amuse themselves in controlling the fates of other men and women, without realizing that they are not in control of their own fates.
The movie is based on a 1782 French epistolary novel titled Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, available in English translation.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Oct 7, 2023 | Theater and play reviews
ya gotta have heart!
Emperor of the North
(1973, rated PG, 118 minutes)
Emperor of the North is a heroic film.
They don’t make too many like this one.
If you plan to watch it, do yourself a favor: plan to watch it twice.
Watch it once so you get the picture: a tramp named A No. 1 (Lee Marvin) is a devil-may-care legendary figure in the hobo camps. He teaches a thing or three to the inexperienced Cigaret (Keith Carradine). He challenges the thuggish railroad policeman, Shack (Ernest Borgnine), there’s a supremely brutal fight on a rolling flatcar, the best ‘bo wins, he finally rides Shack’s “No. 19” to Portland, and, you guessed it, A No. 1 is the king of the road.
Sounds like a few of the “B” movies you’ve seen over the years?
All routinely imaginable stuff, but Marvin’s imperial performance stirs the imagination.
Watch it again. Watch Mr. Marvin show you everything you ever wanted to know about classic heroism of the spirit. See him surpassing his impoverished circumstances to enjoy a rich life, embracing independence, rugged optimism, casually competent leadership, generous mentoring, and the dauntless strength of a Viking in mortal combat.
Finally, A No. 1 abandons the feckless Cigaret. “You had the juice, kid, but you didn’t have the heart!”
A No. 1 rides off, northward, soaring, in high majesty, singing his victory.
American hobo.
American hero.
Emperor of the North.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Financier
Theodore Dreiser’s villain…
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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Aug 24, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature
you can’t change your socks…
Book review:
With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
by Eugene B. Sledge (1923-2001)
New York: Oxford University Press, 1981
326 pages
Marine Cpl. Eugene B. Sledge (his Marine buddies called him “Sledgehammer”) knew there is no glory in combat. There is fear, comradeship, pain, duty, hunger, honesty, sadness, loyalty, and death.
With the Old Breed is a shockingly restrained and horribly candid account of Sledge’s experiences in the attacks on Peleliu and Okinawa by the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment, of the 1st Marine Division in the last year of World War II.
Read it, and you can mumble their prayers as you share the troubled joy of combat soldiers who survive the fighting in which their friends die.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
–
In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
