Word: ghostly
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Cotton Mather saw evidence of ghosts, witchcraft and "dia-bolical handling" in the morally rarefied air of 17th-century Boston. He reports, "An army of devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the center, and after a sort, the first-born of our English settlements: and the houses of the good people there are filled with the doleful shrieks of their children and servants, tormented by invisible hands, with tortures altogether preternatural." Strangely familiar? Who has not heard "doleful shrieks" through the walls of their room as reading period wanes? Who has not felt opposed...
...institution with a past as long and as storied as Harvard's, one would expect at least a few ghost stories. Surprisingly, however, there is little on record. It would make sense that, at the very least, there might be sightings of John Winthrop or one of the Mather boys in the buildings that bear their names. But no, even those most dour of Puritans stay dead. An exhaustive search of the archives brings up next to nothing. It seems that Harvard has managed to steer clear of the supernatural...
...short, it's almost as if we're watching Danes's audition tapes before she became the accomplished actress we know today. Her performance (and the movie as a whole) is like a ghost from her past. Only in the past, her name was Angela Chase--and we enjoyed her emotional journey so much more...
Similarly, the scene in which the ghost of the murdered Bhangane appears at Mabatha's coronation feast remains extraordinarily powerful in translation: wearing a huge, white wooden mask and long twists of rope representing his "gory locks," he is a terrifying apparition as he stomps ominously across the stage, pointing at the murderous King and intoning "Mabatha! Mabatha! Mabatha!" This is one of the joys of watching Umabatha: it succeeds in creating an alchemical marriage between the old story and the new setting...
...another dysfunctional-family Thanksgiving drama, this time with a little incest and crises of identity thrown in. Josh Hamilton plays a troubled fellow who brings home his supremely normal fiancee (Tori Spelling, who's surprisingly good in this sugar-cookie role) only to confront the ghost of his past in his sister, "Jackie O" (a delightfully demented Parker Posey), who sports an obsession with the JFK assassination among her myriad kooky charms. What makes this setup more than just a gimmicky grab-bag for originality is its success in mixing the familiar and the disturbing in the composition...