Arts + Life

So you're looking for a classy heroic alternate to Julia Roberts' ragged Erin Brockovich? May I submit Cate Blanchett as Charlotte Gray....

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

So you're looking for a classy heroic alternate to Julia Roberts' ragged Erin Brockovich? May I submit Cate Blanchett as Charlotte Gray, a volunteer for British Special Operations in WWII looking for her missing RAF pilot lover in occupied France. This story has more holes than the crumbling walls of a chateau, but it is just as beautiful and inscrutable.

A trashy potboiler delight...

By Clay Lowe, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

"Brotherhood of the Wolf" is a French Gothic Romantic thriller in the tradition of Victor Hugo, James Fenimore Cooper, and Jules Verne all rolled in together.

In this popular French potboiler, the Noble Savage returns in all his saintly glory. And although noble savages may be politically incorrect in the U.S. these days, what care the French for our forbiddens?

The audience will be terminally blinded by the worst case of sugar overdose since "The Majestic"...

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

A salute to Czech WWII fighter pilot heroes...

By Clay Lowe, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

They do make movies the way they used to, only it's the Czechs who are doing it.

First we had "Kolya," which won director Jan Sverak an Academy Award in 1996; then we have Jan Hrebejk's "Divided We Fall," and now we have Sverak's newest film, "Dark Blue World."

The United States Army should use "Black Hawk Down" as a training film...

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

The United States Army should use "Black Hawk Down" as a training film. After 20 minutes’ viewing, a recruit would have a very good idea that being caught in a warlord-controlled Somalia town is indeed a life-threatening, bloody business.

You can't be on both teams at once...

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

I can hear reasonably well, and I love all things British, but Robert Altman's "Gosford Park" has tested the limits of my theatrical patience once again: his brilliant ability to film as if we were overhearing conversation at a party (remember "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" or "Nashville") leaves me wanting to be a listener who actually has heard all the conversation.

The plot holes are as many as dot our own moon...

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

Earth in 2079 is less secure than in 2002. Our hero, Gary Sinise, is a weapons inventor mistaken for a bomb-carrying alien. Let the chase begin. Most of this lost-opportunity sci/fi is based on a story by Philip K. Dick, better known for his plots of "Total Recall" and the seminal "Blade Runner."

Newfoundland just won’t give us its news gracefully...

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

That this affair may have precipitated the fall of Marie Antoinette and various other guillotine candidates is the most intriguing part of this "Dangerous Liaisons" wannabe.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

Check out what we've been groovin' on all year...

By Scott Vezdos and Reginald Stively of WCBE's "Ante Meridiem"

Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee...

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

"A Beautiful Mind" is the best exposition of the mind's ability to gyrate to a different tune since "Memento."

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

When Margot says of her first husband, "I met him in the ocean, he came out to me in a canoe," you know this is one weird family.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

What were the best CDs of 2001? We have a few ideas!

gListen Here.

By Scott Vezdos

To warm your heart and soul this upcoming holiday season, WCBE has once again lined up a stellar variety of music and entertainment programs.

These boys have a chemistry when they are together, not because of the cliched older /younger man motif, but because they obviously respect each other and enjoy the company.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

Another "B" film enjoyable enough on a dark winter day but not great enough to outlast the endless conflict in an inscrutable Mid-East...

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

"O ye mortal engines, whose rude throats

Th' immortal Jove's great clamor counterfeit..."

It's so didactic, it's so moralistic, you might feel superior to Arthur Miller...

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

It's so didactic, it's so moralistic, you might feel superior to Arthur Miller, whose story about anti-Semitism in Brooklyn is a sledgehammer reminder that art with a message should at least go obliquely if not subtly. The Jewish grocer says with a straight face, "When you look at me, you don't see me." I think we get the point.

"Dad wanted to make Legos out of wood for me, but he only made two pieces."

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

I lived in a cooperative in the mid-seventies -? it was not pretty: dirty dishes and not-so-free love were the ties that died daily. Nobody would respect a schedule for cleaning, and no one would admit that the idea of faithful mates was a good thing. I suspect Sir Thomas More and Nathaniel Hawthorne found this out as well in "Utopia" and "Brooke Farm." Maybe not the dishes, but for sure the free love.

Helena Bonham Carter on the loose to bilk dentists of their drugs is the best fear generator of the film.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

Maybe a touch of laughing gas would have helped me understand if "Novocaine" is supposed to be a black comedy, film noir, or just a mouthful of decay. The last item is where I lean -? I longed for the "Marathon Man"?s clean horror, not this wimpy plot with turns barely qualifying for twists.

Cleaning the environment of child contamination is a hilarious conceit that turns around the usual fears children have of monsters in closets.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

No one in a literate, civilized society should miss this film --- it is a stunning fusion of sight, sound, and sense.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

I know about teenage daughters, believe me --- rebel they will, and Scarlett Johansson's daughter Suzanne shows teen anguish and rebellion as authentic as could be.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

Veteran editor Eva Gardos ("Mask") has her first directorial production with "An American Rhapsody." It's a story of a young girl's odyssey from Hungary to the U.S. in the 1940's, bouncing from her natal to adopted families with the help of her grandmother.

If you understood that "Seinfeld" was about nothing, then you will accept that "Vertical Ray of the Sun" is about almost nothing.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

If you understood that "Seinfeld" was about nothing, then you will accept that "Vertical Ray of the Sun" is about almost nothing. For instance, Hanoi is awash in color and brother and sister listen to Lou Reed while they exercise their bodies and exorcise their incestuous longings. Nothing else happens.

"After five minutes of this movie, you're going to wish you had 10 beers." These bursts of wisdom are indicative of an odd girl who will have to find out how to maneuver in a much less honest world.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

The Coen brothers are back with their usual barnyard of eccentric characters.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

I haven't quite figured out why I love film noir, but the Coen Brothers make me remember some of the reasons. Cinematographer Roger Deakin drenches the shots in vivid black and white, reminding me of noir's diet of good and evil, like a virginal young musician who suprisingly goes down on Billy Bob Thornton's Ed to reward him for trying to help her, thus precipitating an almost deadly accident because of the reward.

She's a little troublemaker with a big heart, and if you don't watch her, she'll steal the gnome from your garden and then your heart.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

All we get here are actors whose lives and conversation are punctuated by no more wisdom than comments about perfuming private parts and penis size.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

Ed Burns's Tommy Riley is caught renting "Breakfast at Tiffany's," leading to an affair and a pregnancy. This is the most excitement you're going to get in this Woody Allen rip-off.

May to December can be the cruelest months if they're about a relationship between a young woman and an older man.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"