by Richard Subber | Mar 9, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
Cue the “Brodie girls”…
Movie review:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969, rated PG, 116 minutes) is all Maggie Smith, all the time.
There is a story line: deeply committed and outspoken teacher pushes young girls to maturity while she dabbles in love and grasps everywhere for approval.
Miss Jean Brodie (Smith) creates a mostly adoring set of “Brodie girls” as she flourishes and flaunts and flounders at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in 1930s Edinburgh.
She leaves a trail of broken hearts and endures the ultimate humiliation of losing her job after she is “betrayed” by a student who almost grows up in the process.
Good acting, good story, good entertainment.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: Cleopatra: A Life
…don’t even think
about Gordon Gekko…
by Stacy Schiff
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 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 | Feb 9, 2025 | Theater and play reviews
lions know much
Movie review:
Out of Africa
1985
Rated PG
161 minutes
Out of Africa is a lovably unconventional love story, and the African scenes of flora and fauna are just lush. It won seven Oscars.
A daughter in a rich Danish family, Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) works hard to maintain a coffee plantation in early 20th century Kenya, and in time she falls hard for the cavalierly independent Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford). They enjoy an ill-fated romance, ended by his untimely death.
This poem reflects my “Thumbs up!” review:
Lions know much
The she-lion came first
before sunrise lighted the lower plain.
She did not sniff the square of whitened stones,
nor the deranged, softly mounded earth.
She kept walking, slowly, in the lifting dark.
Later, she returned, with her mate,
to dally on that sunlit slope,
and gaze at the heedless beasts
on the plain below.
The pair returned, another day,
with easy steps,
to tarry in that terraced space,
they could not know, perhaps,
of the man who had been laid
in their earth, in their domain,
they lingered, not knowing, perhaps,
that the still form beneath their feet
had been a gentle man,
but aware, somehow,
that he had been of their world,
that they could add grace to his grave.
The film is based on the 1937 book, Out of Africa, by Karen Blixen (1885-1962) (pen name Isak Dinesen).
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Movie review. My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Address Unknown
A friendship corrupted by Nazi hatred in WWII
by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 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 | Dec 31, 2024 | American history, History, Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
to be or not to be…
Movie review:
Old Henry
The tension builds slowly in Old Henry (2021, not rated, 99 minutes) and you may be tempted to stop waiting to find out what it’s all about.
Truth is, it’s easy to stay with it.
There are no “stars” in Old Henry, and no Hollywood gush.
It’s a 1906 Oklahoma western that doesn’t need a soundtrack.
There is father-son conflict and bonding galore.
There is persistent necessity to consider the yin and yang of what’s right and what’s wrong and a lot of the in-betweens.
You’ll learn a few things you don’t already know about the real-life Henry McCarty who called himself William Bonney and is known to history as Billy the Kid.
You can take some time to think about this: are we who we were, or are we who we are, or can we be who we want to be, or should we be who our loved ones think we are…
Old Henry received the “Best Feature” award at the 2021 Almeria Western Film Festival.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
“The beginning is always today.”
(quote, Mary Shelley)
so get started…
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 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 3, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading, My poetry, Poetry, Reflections, Theater and play reviews
unforgettable…
Movie review and book review:
Atonement
Atonement is a story of lives of irredeemable sadness. Ian McEwan wrote the book that is faithfully portrayed in this 2007 film (rated R, 123 minutes)—it got seven Oscar nominations—starring Keira Knightly (Cecilia), James McAvoy (Robbie), Romola Garai (child Briony), Saoirse Ronan (18-year-old Briony), and Vanessa Redgrave (mature Briony).
In brief: Briony, a child, tells a dreadful lie about her sister’s lover, forcing Cecilia and Robbie to live separate, desperately tormented lives during World War II.
This poem is my “Thumbs Up” review of the movie and the book.
Unforgettable
This memory is lava hot,
it mingles, lava slow,
in all my thoughts,
in all my mind.
It is a crumble, peat, dark,
peat rich, no single whole,
but bits of all.
I cannot grasp it entire.
It fills me,
it is full of me,
full with my dread imaginings,
full with my discarded dreams,
so full…
It burns, it sears,
a red haze in my every gaze,
a scarlet shackle on each heartbeat.
I accept the impotence of atonement.
My long-ago childish deed cannot be undone,
that indulgence in excitement
and attention and novelty
and vengeance and purest love.
Unbidden, I saw an act I didn’t understand,
two lovers, I cherished them,
their coupling had no inner meaning for me,
yet showed they had more love for each other
than each for me…
Later, a twisted crime he did not—could not—commit,
yet I accused—“I saw him”—I lied,
to hurt him and to keep her, apart, for me.
That lie broke them.
At that moment, the words tasted brave
and older than my years.
The taste became gall.
Later, I was to know that I killed them.
My life has been my penance.
Now I understand what I could not see
and could not then feel.
Now I feel their horror that I invented
in place of their happiness.
Now I endure the unhappiness
they could not escape,
the terror born of a child’s simple plan
in a child’s heart.
…I keep those false words—“I saw him”—
spoken in righteous innocence,
in unknowable ignorance,
in unremembered pleasure…
I did not know I was trading my portion of happiness
for a memory that I keep
in a hole in my heart.
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Movie review. Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Good Will Hunting, a movie about love (review)
Robin Williams nails it…
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 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 | Nov 5, 2024 | Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
children have real lives…
Movie review:
The Breakfast Club
Which one of the kids in The Breakfast Club (1985, rated R, 97 minutes) is most like you?
Claire (Molly Ringwald), John (Judd Nelson), Andrew (Emilio Estevez), Allison (Ally Sheedy), or Brian (Anthony Hall)?
These are children whose lives you wouldn’t wish on your grandchildren.
Their Saturday detention for various student wrongdoings is a hell-fired playground for growing up and facing truths and learning about the wonderful unknowns of human kindness.
In one brief day they grow and change and assert their special personalities.
They become better people.
The Breakfast Club is funny, it’s sad, and only the kids think there are mysteries.
It becomes a feel good movie.
There’s something more: I imagine that you can’t watch the movie and avoid thinking, even once, “yeah, I was a little bit like that when I was younger.”
I imagine that you’ll take a minute or two,
like I did,
to think about how you’re different now.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: Grace Notes
Is it prose or poetry?
by Brian Doyle
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 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 31, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
slow-moving lava love…
Book review:
The Bridges of Madison County
Robert James Waller (1939-2017)
New York: Warner Books Inc., 1992
171 pages
The Bridges of Madison County was a notably popular new book. However, I’m aware that not everyone is a fan.
If you’re looking for highly stoked eroticism and high-rolling lives that throw off sparks when they touch, look elsewhere.
Frankly, for lots of tastes, good advice is: look elsewhere no matter what you’re looking for.
For me, Bridges documents the chance intersection of the putatively unremarkable lives of Francesca and Robert with all the heat and dazzle of slow-moving lava, without its destructive power. They come together, they permit each other to nourish their beautiful personae and they generate a passion that consumes without burning.
Francesca and Robert come together too late in their lives, after unbreakable commitments have been made to other cherished persons who, regrettably, are not like themselves.
I am drawn to the unsounded depths of their love and their absolute, cascading, undeniable recognition of each other as the unforgettable objects of their burgeoning desire.
They understand that they must be content with the short lifetime of their dalliance. They honor their love by deeply understanding its nature, and by accepting the permanent separation that their unyielding integrity requires.
Robert whispers to Francesca: “…this kind of certainty comes only once…”
The Bridges of Madison County is a love song, a courtship, a delicate primer on yearning, a too brief opportunity to know how it feels to be in love like that.
Give it a try.
p.s. Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep made the movie version with the same title in 1995 (rated PG-13, 135 minutes). You’ll love it if you like the book.
Waller’s book and the movie equally reveal the ethereal bond between Robert and Francesca. There is frank eroticism, with different physical and philosophical elements in the film and book, and a shared electric vitality.
The film and the book offer stylistically divergent life dramas that converge to a singular powerful love, and a perpetual loneliness that Robert and Francesca cannot minimize.
Give the film a try.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: A Cold Welcome
The culprit was global cooling,
500 years ago…
by Sam White
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 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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