by Richard Subber | Mar 26, 2024 | History, Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
more than a war story….
Movie review:
Eye of the Needle
Good vs. evil is the undercurrent of Eye of the Needle (1981, rated R, 112 minutes) but the drama is in the living and the dying of the fully believable characters: Donald Sutherland as the WWII German spy—“die Nadel”—and Kate Nelligan as Lucy, who becomes his nemesis.
A worldly viewer can easily guess the ending of this movie, so it’s not really a spoiler to say that Sutherland, the brutal German spy, has the Allies’ Normandy invasion plans and is trying to get them to Germany when he is shipwrecked on a remote island off Scotland. Lucy, a patriotic English woman who is the wife of a sheep farmer on the island, falls in love with die Nadel before she figures out what he is and kills him.
Die Nadel is desperate, but human. Lucy is lonely, but ultimately she rages to do the right thing. The brief seduction scene is a lover’s delight (brief nudity). The awkward interaction of the two reluctant lovers is credible. The violence is matter-of-fact and vicious.
Eye of the Needle works as a war story, a spy story, and a love story. It won’t put you to sleep.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: An Empire Divided
King George and his ministers
wanted the Caribbean sugar islands
more than they wanted the 13 colonies…
by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy
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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 | Feb 27, 2024 | Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
“We all love you, preacher!”
Movie review:
Pale Rider
“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
Revelation 6:8
Pale Rider (1985, rated R, 115 minutes) goes a bit deeper than your usual Clint Eastwood action thriller.
As “the preacher,” Eastwood creates a mostly low-key character who mostly waxes philosophic about life and its vicissitudes, but also persistently urges the good guys to do some good, and (you’re not surprised) straps on his big pistol when he needs it.
The beleaguered “tin pan” miners, emboldened by “the preacher,” battle the vicious takeover attempts by the big bad rich guy, and you can guess who savors victory.
There’s an almost completely platonic love interest with the mother, Sarah (Carrie Snodgress is divinely demure), and 15-year-old Megan (Sydney Penny) learns a lot about unrequited love.
Pale Rider invites you to look into the hearts of realistic people.
The obvious allusion to Revelation 6:8 (“…behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death…”) is puzzling. The preacher is not apocalyptic, there is no hint of theology in his role, and he mysteriously and provocatively rides away into the mountains at the last minute, leaving everyone else to resume their lives.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shantung Compound
They didn’t care much
about each other…
by Langdon Gilkey
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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 | 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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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 | 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.
Remember the Tallahatchie Bridge?
Molly Johnson sings it right…
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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 | 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.
Dirty Dancing (1987) (movie review)
Oh baby, baby, baby…
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse 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 4, 2023 | Theater and play reviews
from the heart, a patriot
Movie review:
Darkest Hour
Gary Oldman was 59 years old when he won an Oscar (Best Actor) for portraying a completely believable Winston Churchill who decided in June 1940 to fight Hitler instead of settling for a completely risky peace agreement.
Darkest Hour (2019, rated PG-13, 125 minutes) is a gem. Oldman is Churchill: overweight, jowly, devotee of long cigars and whiskey, imperious, meekly in love with Clementine (he called her “Clemmie,” she called him “Pig”), a flamboyant patriot, and wartime leader.
Churchill was a career politician, of course, and Oldman deftly portrays his Machiavellian strengths and weaknesses.
Churchill was an aristocratic patriot in the core of his being.
Less than a month after he became prime minister, Churchill energized Parliament:
“We shall defend our island…we shall fight on the beaches…on the landing grounds…in the fields…in the streets…in the hills…we shall never surrender.”
Darkest Hour is Churchill’s (Oldman’s) bright triumph.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
The Witches: Salem, 1692 (book review)
…it was a community gone crazy…
by Stacy Schiff
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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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