Word: film
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When it comes to handing out gushy blurbs for movies, David Letterman is no Larry King. Yet when Natalie Portman was a guest on his show recently, the crabby old host couldn't stop raving about her new film Brothers. "This is the finest film made in the last 12, 20 years," he effused, and Portman nearly ducked, as if to avoid being drenched by the torrent of praise...
Brothers isn't up there in the empyrean of classic movies, but it is a solid drama - about a family at war with itself - that handles its combustible elements with care and gets strong, accurate performances from Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman. The release of the film has either perfect or ominous timing, for it opens just after President Obama's announcement that he was sending additional troops to Afghanistan. Brothers, written by David Benioff and directed by Jim Sheridan, is about a soldier sent to that perilous region, with dire results for him, his fellow Marines...
...romance (Heloise and Abelard) and in 19th century poetry (Tennyson's "Enoch Arden"), not to mention dozens of movies about men whose wives think they're dead and marry someone else. All these motifs appear in the script that Anders Thomas Jensen wrote for Susanne Bier's 2004 Danish film Brodre, of which Brothers is a nearly scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, Americanization. Except for a few stunt exercises, like Gus Van Sant's Psycho and Michael Haneke's remake of his own Funny Games, I can't think of a movie that so closely adheres...
...inevitably generated controversy. Besides Fukuda and Okamoto, members of a freshman class of 26 female DPJ lawmakers include Kayoko Isogai, a temp worker who was unemployed when she stood for election, and Mieko Tanaka, a former secretary and actress who had a small role in an erotic horror film, Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf. The group has been criticized for being little more than pretty faces unqualified to hold public office. During campaigning, some newspapers dubbed them "Ozawa's princesses" because most were recruited to run for parliament by Ichiro Ozawa, the DPJ's 67-year-old secretary general...
...minute 3-D film at the City of David visitors' center, narrated by a fictional Israeli Indian Jones-type character named Amos (armed with a "shovel and a Bible"), never mentions Christianity or Islam and ends by proclaiming that "neighborhood by neighborhood, Jerusalem is renewed as the eternal capital of Israel." The problem is that Jerusalem was not always the capital of Israel - the city was ruled for centuries by Christian and Muslim empires. Today, its status remains disputed. The City of David and the Old City are located in predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel from...