• Krishna Shenoi in Bangalore
Dear Mr Robert Zemeckis Sir,
My name is Forrest. Not Forrest Gump, but Forrest Narayan. I am ten years old.
I have two brothers and their names are Marty and Satyajit and Marty is twenty years old and Satyajit is six and three quarters.
• Kartina Richardson in New York City
The first thing you must realize about "Stormy Weather," before anything else, is that it is not real. Of course it isn't real in the sense that it is a narrative film and as such it is fiction, but it is unreal in another way. It is a romanticization of African American life offering one-dimensional characters without nuance-- in "response" to the one dimensional un-nuanced characters in other films.
The movie opens as famous dancer Bill Williamson (Bill Robinson) receives a magazine in his honor "celebrating the magnificent contribution of the colored race to the entertainment of the world during the past twenty five years." This prompts him to reminisce about his career and courtship of the beautiful singer Selina Rogers (Lena Horne). The plot however, is of little importance. The film is primarily a vehicle for famous black talent in music and dance. These are glamorous blacks in romantic and dramatic leads. Blacks with sex appeal. Blacks with their own storyline.
• Gerardo Valero in Mexico City
When I reviewed Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" a few months ago, several readers brought up the point that when a filmmaker constantly uses extreme violence in his films, there surely must be something wrong about the director himself.
I don't buy into that theory, but while watching Quentin Tarantino's films, which I mostly enjoy a lot, I have to admit I have a hard time disassociating my diagnosis of the filmmaker with his own work, especially "Pulp Fiction" which is clearly a film with an amazing understanding of violent criminals, the drug culture and the fine art of original cursing.
• Krishna Shenoi in Bangalore
Back then, I could watch Max Fleischer's Superman cartoons forever and never get bored. Today, the case is almost the same. Oh, those films have some of the finest animation I've ever seen--even by today's standards, the animation is phenomenal, right from the fluidity of the movements of the characters to the uncanny weight of the objects. The characters and objects had shadows too.
• Olivia Collette in Montreal
With the exception of "The Matrix" and the odd documentary, movies tend to pay only lip service an architect's job. "Sleepless in Seattle's" Sam Baldwin is an architect, but he might as well be a meat-packer. The movie is a romantic comedy with little room for anything but serendipity. It takes us to a couple of architectural landmarks, but not because Sam's profession compels him to.
So naturally, I was curious to know what the architectural community thought of "Inception," where the discipline is actually effectual. I was a bit disappointed to discover that while architectural journalists were entertained by the film, they didn't care much for its buildings. James Benedict Brown calls Ariadne "a dependable square," Aaron Betsky says her work is "banal," and David Neustein finds that Cobb and Mal's dream city is "hardly a honeymoon destination."
• Seongyong Cho in Seoul
While it is one or two steps behind "Dr. Strangelove," "The President's Analyst" (1967) is a very good black comedy sniggering at Cold War paranoid. Maybe it's not as ruthless as that great comedy, but the movie romps cheerfully on its subjects with a take-no-prisoner attitude. And during this loony joy ride we eventually discover that the movie foretold something very accurate more than 40 years ago.
We have seen many psychiatrist whose lives become more burdensome than usual thanks to their unusual patients in the movies ("Analyze This") and TV series("The Sopranos" and "In Treatment"), but I think no one can top our hero Dr. Sidney Schaefer (James Coburn). His new patient is none other than the president of the United States, the most powerful figure in the world who incidentally does not appear on the screen.
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