by Richard Subber | Jun 28, 2025 | American history, History, Human Nature, Politics, Power and inequality, Theater and play reviews
power brokers aren’t good guys…
Movie review:
All the President’s Men
It’s a good guess that you watched All the President’s Men (1976, rated PG, 138 min) a long time ago.
Now’s a good time to watch it again. You get to see Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford at work in their younger years, and you get to see the good guys win.
Bob Woodward (Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Hoffman) give workmanlike performances as they grind through the often mind-numbing work of bringing down a corrupt president and his corrupt henchmen. I don’t think any women were involved in the really bad Watergate business.
The drama is created as the “Woodstein” duo and Deep Throat and dubious/credulous Washington Post editors relentlessly push for the boring investigative legwork that ultimately reveals the frightening cabal of power brokers who will do close to anything to keep Nixon in office.
The good guys win. Mostly they didn’t fear for their own safety. Mostly they didn’t think they were heroic. Mostly they didn’t think the job was hopeless. Mostly they wanted to do the right thing.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Old Friends (book review)
Tracy Kidder tells truth about old age…
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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 | May 29, 2025 | American history, Politics, Power and inequality, Theater and play reviews
the spadework for the 13th Amendment…
Movie review:
Lincoln
2012, PG-13, 150 minutes
The movie Lincoln is about Lincoln, and we don’t need to spell out his name. Daniel Day-Lewis gives a performance as the Great Emancipator that rings true on both the good side and the not so good side. Sally Field rather woodenly plays the role of Mrs. Lincoln, or, as she preferred, “Mrs. President.”
Lincoln was a politician—we tend to forget that. The subplot of the movie is the horse trading and the not-so-savory vote buying that went on in the runup to the successful vote on the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery. Lincoln’s right-hand men did what he asked them to do and what they knew he wanted them to do—and Lincoln finally did a bit of the spadework himself.
Lincoln is not a spectacular movie. It’s dark in many ways. It is profoundly historical, and the drama keeps peeking through the windows.
One bag of potato chips is enough.
By the way, Lincoln was born in 1809, when it wasn’t widely popular to give babies a middle name.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review:
John Eliot: “Apostle to the Indians”
…a righteous man of his times
by Ola Elizabeth Winslow
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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 | May 4, 2025 | Theater and play reviews
meditative, that’s evil for you…
Movie review:
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Among more than 30 film adaptions of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a 1945 release (not rated, 110 minutes) starring Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray is generally acclaimed as the best. It got four Oscar nominations. Different viewers will have different opinions. It’s not my favorite.
Just indulge the fantasy element: a painted portrait ages grotesquely while its subject, Dorian Gray, lives an unimaginably dissolute life and never looks older than a handsome 20-year-old. Gray’s impulse to sell his soul for eternal youth was an offer The Evil One couldn’t refuse.
The 1945 B&W version superficially treats Gray’s moral struggles and capitulation which are so vividly probed in the book. A young Angela Lansbury was nominated as Best Supporting Actress for her rather placid role as Sybil Vane, Gray’s first victim. The actors talk too fast.
I like the 1973 version (rated TV-14, 111 minutes) starring Shane Briant as Dorian. The pace is natural, the cinematography is well staged in color, and the script obviously reflects the often meditative tone of the novel. Briant is a credible Dorian. The women in this production are rather conventionally feminine and they tend to be a part of the scenery.
A 2009 film titled Dorian Gray (rated R, 112 minutes, Ben Barnes as Dorian) gets this classic story mostly wrong. This is a Hollywood-ized version, with too much action, too much graphic sexuality, and too much violence. Wilde’s philosophical ruminations on good and evil get lost. Colin Firth as Dorian’s amoral mentor, Lord Henry Wotton, is a quite believably demonic tempter and a cad.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
“Tear it up,” says Kurt Vonnegut
“Write a six line poem, about anything…
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Empyrean: new poems with 57 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 | Apr 6, 2025 | Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
through the looking glass…
Movie review:
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Frances McDormand can do comedy, in case you were wondering.
She plays the title character in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008, rated PG, 92 minutes).
Guinevere Pettigrew is a middle-aged, lonely, unlucky governess looking for work—any job will do—in London in 1939.
She gets mixed up with a flibbertigibbet American celebrity whose lifestyle is different, way different. She steps onto the fast track for a while. There’s a fair share of wide-eyed gaping on the part of Miss Pettigrew.
Miss Pettigrew obviously has her own set of moral standards, and her own expectations about what life should have to offer, and her own approach to living the good life.
Miss Pettigrew steps through the looking glass for a time, does her best to make things better for everyone, and finds a gentleman who’s willing to share her tomorrows.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Comanche Empire
here’s the other story of the American West…
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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 | 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.
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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 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.
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 74 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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