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PaL

Member since 6/28/2007, last signed in awhile ago.
"PaL"
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Personal statement:

Hello out there! Let's create some community on this site. I'd love my Spout Blog to be a place to generate some lively discussion about the movies I write about. Leave a comment, or send me a message...there are amazing movies out there to be discovered. 

Daily updates to my personal weblog, The Buddha Diaries, sometimes include movie reviews, which I'll be posting to Spout.

I'm author of The Real Bush Diaries, as well as 2 books of poetry, 2 novels, a memoir, and a monograph on the artist David Hockney.

If you are a blogger interested in a link exchange, contact me at  peteratlarge @ mac.com.

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The Counterfeiters
The Counterfeiters
The Counterfeiters
By PaL in PaL Blog
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 "I have another movie to recommend--this one in current theatrical release: The Counterfeiters. Set in the German concentration camps during World War II, the based-on-fact story concerns the Nazis' attempt to scuttle the Allies' economic standing by flooding the global economy with counterfeit pounds sterling and American dollars. To that end, they assembled a team of the most skillful Jewish artisans and put them to work in a privileged quarter of the Sachsenhausen camp, under the leadership of one Salomon Sorowitsch (Sally), portrayed here with intense conviction by Karl Markovics.Under the constant threat of death and at the dubious mercy of their Nazi overseers, they managed to produce several denominations of English banknotes that were declared genuine even by experts at the Bank of England. Put back to work on the production of the American dollar, the team's efforts were delayed by a single recalcitrant fellow-prisoner whose conscience balked at the idea that ... " [More]
Michael Clayton
Michael Clayton
Michael Clayton Grabs you Round ...
By PaL in PaL Blog
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 "It's dawn. Three horses on a hillside, powerful, serene, majestic. They are connected with their natural environment, at peace with their own nature... Behind the man who stands there, gazing at them, down at the bottom of the hill, his expensive black Mercedes explodes in a burst of searing flame. Explodes again. He was supposed to be inside it. This is Michael Clayton's moment of truth, in the film whose title is appropriately his name. It's the moment that he glimpses an end to his own suffering. And suffer he does. His life has gone awry, his moral compass long since lost. Separated from wife and family, awash in gambling debts, he has surrendered his career as a lawyer to acting as the "janitor" to his corporate law firm, doing whatever it takes to clean up those inconvenient messes that threaten the firm's image--or that of its clients. He has learned to skillfully manipulate the truth to serve the corporate interest. From that start on t ... " [More]
The Lives of Others
The Lives of Others
Cruelty and the Futility of Tor ...
By PaL in PaL Blog
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 ""The Lives of Others" is a great film, and an uncomfortably timely reminder of the cruelty and the futility of torture in a week when the Burma junta of generals again comes to world attention with their human rights abuses; and on a day (yesterday) when the New York Times headlined the shameful story of Bush's continuing, secret authorization of techniques "to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics" in the course of interrogation. "The Lives of Others" is the story of a state-sponsored eavesdropper and torturer--not the kind who pulls out toenails and applies electrical shocks to the genitals, but one who gets results by sleep and sustenance deprivation and prolonged, relentless and implacable questioning followed up by threats to the subject's loved ones. The first scene shows that he's very good at what he does. He's on his way up in the Stasi (the former East German secret pol ... " [More]
Into the Wild
Into the Wild
Powerful and Majestic
By PaL in PaL Blog
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 "Small wonder that Christopher McCandless, the central character in the Sean Penn-directed movie, Into the Wild was afraid of water: from an elemental point of view, he was all fire. Unable to put down roots anywhere, he darted from place to place, infectiously re-lighting the fire in everyone he met--and unable to tame his own suffiicently to avoid being consumed by it. In the end, he was done in not only by water, as the river in spate prevented his return from "the wild"; but also, as fire inevitably is, by the absence of fuel to continue along his path. He died of starvation. Seen from this elemental point of view, "Into the Wild" was a powerful and majestic film. The earth figured prominently in the form of the great mountains of Alaska, the Southern California desert, the roads that led in all directions, predominantly north and south. There was water in plenty: the ocean where Chris learned to overcome his fear of water and passed his fire on to a ... " [More]
Lady Chatterley
Lady Chatterley
'Lady Chatterley' Smoulders
By PaL in PaL Blog
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 "Okay, let's talk about sex. Ready, everyone? I'm trusting you to get back to me on this one... We went to see "Lady Chatterley" last night--the new French film based on the second version of D. H. Lawrence's novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover"--the one that's entitled "John Thomas and Lady Jane." John Thomas, for those unfamiliar with English idiom (that's English English) was in my young day--and perhaps still is--a common euphemism for the penis. Lady Jane...? Well, I never heard it used that way, but I'm sure Lawrence had a wry smile when he thought up the title. As I recall, he wrote the second and third versions because he was not wholly satisfied with the first: he wanted it to be less coy, more frank, more explicit than he had originally allowed himself. (Remember, he had been in trouble with the obscenity police already in the past.) This time, I'm guessing, he wanted to get it right, no matter what the morality brigade might say.The film? De ... " [More]
Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary
Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary
'Blind Spot' a Searing Reminder ...
By PaL in PaL Blog
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 "(cross-posted in The Buddha Diaries) Friday night, we watched the movie "Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary." I can't remember how we were alerted to it, but it must have been on our Netflix list because someone had recommended it.. So, thanks to whoever did, because it's an amazing documentary. The camera dwells exclusively on the one person, Traudi Junge, who sits in the same position throughout a series of interviews, recalling her days as secretary to one of the great monsters of history. Frau Junge's is an absolutely compelling story, from the time she had barely heard of Hitler as a young girl to her move to Berlin with the hope of becoming a dancer; to the secretarial skills tests she was urged to take and her first interview with the man she described as as a kindly older gentleman, and particularly as "fatherly"--she herself had grown up without one; to her recollections of typing to his dictation, mostly personal things, she said, and speeches, never anythin ... " [More]
Babel
Babel
The Voices of Babel run Deep
By PaL in PaL Blog
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 "(Cross posted in The Buddha Diaries) About halfway through BABEL I wondered what I was doing there. By the time the film ended, I understood why I had stayed. It's a wrenching movie, with violence at its core. Knowing little about it before seeing it, I was ready for some harmless escapist fare. What I got was something far more difficult. It's about human beings caught in the act of being human--in the most dire of all imaginable circumstances. It's about bad things happening to good people, and about bad people's cold indifference to them. It's about the consequences of mindless action, about random acts of violence and calculated cruelty. It's about love and hatred, the results of fear and anger and mistrust, about guilt and innocence, official heartlessness and individual compassion. It's about the agony of loss and grief, and the mad, occasional ecstasy of letting go all inhibitions. It's about the joys and fears around human sexuality ... " [More]
Sicko
Sicko
In "Sicko," Moore ask ...
By PaL in PaL Blog
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 "(From my blog, The Buddha Diaries) Who are we? It’s the question Michael Moore comes to, after ninety minutes or so spent examining the American health care system—and finding it lacking. We saw his film, “Sicko” at the end of last week. I don’t like the title: it’s too flip for the serious work he has undertaken here—a soul-searching that turns out to be about much more than the health system. It probes deep into the national culture and the national character. Is this what we have become, he asks? A nation of people who surrender without a second thought to those who exploit the mental lethargy they have induced in us?Is it any accident, I wonder, that we have accepted the odd notion of “The American Dream” as our ideal? Are we not all rather suffering through what Henry Miller called "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare"? Are we all so permanently lulled by the sleep of ovine contentment that we don’t notice how the v ... " [More]
The Namesake
The Namesake
The Namesake Sparkles with Quiet
By PaL in PaL Blog
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 "(From my daily weblog, The Buddha Diaries) The Namesake is a good movie, well worth seeing. It’s the story of a Bengali couple, married by family arrangement, who move to the United States and bring up their own family, a son and a daughter, maintaining their own rich cultural traditions in the context of American society.It’s a film, as I saw it, in good part about civility. The relationship between man and wife starts out having nothing to do with romantic love, or the reasons for which we in the West choose to get married. It’s characterized by civility and restraint, by mutual tolerance—even of mistakes—and a respect of each others’ inner privacy. We watch it grow into a deep and abiding love—and one which allows for the growth of an intimacy eventually far richer than the intimacy of spilling every secret of the heart and soul or of leaping into bed at the first opportunity. Here in the West, we tend to blunder mindlessly across ... " [More]
Blood Diamond
Blood Diamond
Blood Diamond: Sounding the Alarm
By PaL in PaL Blog
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 "(From my daily weblog, The Buddha Diaries) Blood Diamond is not a film for the squeamish, or for those who avoid any kind of violence on the screen. The dreadful scenes of civil war depicted in the movie are shown in unsparing detail, with brother fighting pitilessly against brother, and with boy-children trained to kill innocent villagers mercilessly with the assault rifles put into their hands. Manipulated by corporate European diamond traders, these desperate people slaughter each other in pursuit of a global commodity that most of them never even see. The redemption myth centers on the post-colonial adventurer played (extraordinarily well) by Leonardo di Caprio, whose cynicism and greed drive his quest for freedom through the wealth to which diamonds offer a desperate, violence-strewn path. He partners with an unwilling village fisherman whose family has been torn apart by war and who holds the secret to a spectacular fortune in the form of a diamond he has found and hidden ... " [More]
Come Early Morning
Come Early Morning
Come Early Morning
By PaL in PaL Blog
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 "(From my daily weblog, The Buddha DIaries) Come Early Morning is the story of a Southern woman, Lucy, whose addiction to booze and sex threaten to ruin her life. Her emotionally unreachable father is a might-have-been guitarist whose performance anxieties prevented him from fulfilling his promise and who has fallen victim to his own addictions--to booze, also, and to religion. Lucy has taken to drinking too much at the local saloon and waking up in bed the following morning with strange men. I enjoyed this film a lot. It's what they call, absurdly, a "small film," but it's very well done. Superb acting by Ashley Judd, and a great sound track of mostly country music. It manages all of the above without becoming maudlin or looking for simple answers to complex human problems. " [More]

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Films I've seen
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Films I want to buy
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My favorite films