Hogfather (2006)Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 |
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It’s Hogswatch (equivalent to Christmas) on the Discworld and the Hogfather has gone missing, requiring Death to take his place while his granddaughter Susan endeavors to find out what has happened. |
The Legend of 1900 (1998)Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 |
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Shortly after the Second World War, Max, a transplanted American, visits an English pawn shop to sell his trumpet. The shopkeeper recognizes the tune Max plays as one on a wax master of an unreleased recording, discovered and restored from shards found in a piano salvaged from a cruise ship turned hospital ship, now slated for demolition. This chance discovery prompts a story from Max, which he relates both to the shopkeeper and later to the official responsible for the doomed vessel, for Max is a born storyteller. Though now down on his luck and disillusioned by his wartime experiences, the New Orleans-born Max was once an enthusiastic and gifted young jazz musician, whose longest gig was several years with the house band aboard the Virginian, a posh cruise ship. While gaining his sea legs, he was befriended by another young man, the pianist in the same band, whose long unlikely name was Danny Boodman T.D. Lemons 1900, though everyone just called him 1900, the year of his birth. Abandoned in first class by his immigrant parents, 1900 was found and adopted by Danny, a stoker, and raised in the engine rooms, learning to read by reading horseracing reports to his adoptive dad. After Danny’s death in an accident, 1900 remained on the ship. Increasingly lured by the sound of the piano in the first-class ballroom, he eventually became a gifted pianist, a great jazz improvisationist, a composer of rich modern music inspired by his intense observation of the life around him, the stories passengers on all levels of the ship trusted him enough to tell. He also grew up to be a charming, iconoclastic young man, at once shrewd and oddly innocent. His talent earned him such accolades that he was challenged by, and bested Jelly Roll Morton in an intense piano duel that had poor Max chewing paper on the sofa in agonies of suspense. And yet for all the richness and variety of his musical expression, he never left the ship, except almost, once, in the aftermath of his infatuation with a beautiful young woman immigrant who inspired the music committed to the master Max discovers in the pawnshop. Max realizes that 1900 must still be on the ship, and determines to find him, and to find out once and for all why he has so consistently refused to leave. |
Frailty (2001)Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 |
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Fenton Meeks (Matthew McConaughey), comes forth to tell the FBI that his brother Adam may be the serial killer who calls himself God’s Hands, who the FBI has been searching for. The film uses flashbacks to show Meeks’ childhood with a father (Bill Paxton) who believed he was on a mission from God to destroy demons that inhabit human bodies. Fenton saw his dad as evil, while Adam saw him as a hero. |
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 |
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In Italy, the American writer Sam Dalmas (Tony Musant) witnesses an attempt of murder of the owner of an art gallery, a couple of days before his foreseen return to the United States of America. He decides to stay with his girlfriend Julia (Suzy Kendall) and help the police in the investigation, while the serial killer stalks Julia and him. |
Good Hair (2009)Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 |
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Chris Rock explores the wonders of African-American hairstyles. |
My Brilliant Career (1979)Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 |
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The heroine, Sybylla (Davis), a headstrong girl growing up in early 20th century Australia, has the opportunity of marriage to a wealthy young man (Harry played by Niel) whom she loves, but rejects it in order to maintain her independence, preferring to take a job as governess/housekeeper to the family of an illiterate neighbor to whom her father owes money. |
The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 |
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When Edward leaves Bella, her hole world is turned upside down. With Bella’s heart broken, she turns to Jacob (Jake) her best friend to fill the void that was left by Edward. As Bella spends more time with Jake, she learns that there’s more than vampires in the town of Forks. |
Fame (2009)Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 |
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An updated version of the 1980 musical, which centered on the students of the New York Academy of Performing Arts. |
Broken Flowers (2005)Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 |
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Sherry, the girlfriend of the former “Don Juan,” successful older businessman Don Johnston, ends their relationship. At around the same time, he receives an anonymous pink letter revealing to him that he has a nineteen-year-old son, but he has no clue as to who the mother might be. Don’s friend and neighbor ,Winston, an aspiring “Sherlock Holmes,” compiles a list of Don’s former girlfriends and presses a plan for a cross-country trip to meet each of them and subsequently learn the identity of the son. A reluctant and emotionless Don, armed with flowers, first visits the widow, Laura, preceded by her teenage daughter, Lolita, who affronts him by appearing naked in an asexual context in a show of emancipation at his expense. Laura herself, however, is the one person in the film who treats him humanely and as a sexual being. Then he meets the successful real estate agent Dora and her husband Ron and they have an uncomfortable dinner together, with Don as a third wheel. He next takes flowers to the office old flame Dr. Carmen, now a writer on the psychology of pets and a communicator with animals, (based on her ‘relationship’ with a deceased canine.) Her much younger secretary gives Don a markedly icy reception supposedly because of his unannounced arrival. He unapologetically imposes on Carmen’s schedule, but despite his best efforts he can not penetrate her armor. And the secretary, as an afterthought, returns the flowers. Lastly, he plies his charms with Penny, yet another example of resentment, living in the woods with a pair of younger motorcycle toughs, one of whom, on the pretense of gentlemanly concern about what he makes out to be insensitivity towards Penny, cold-cocks Don Johnston. Johnston wakes up in his car with the flowers broken. A little desperate now, he makes the brief acquaintanceship of a young, kind-hearted lady florist, Sun Green, who begins to show some inclination towards tenderness, although she finds his name, Don Johnston, impossibly quaint. Back on the street, unshaven and looking increasingly like a bum, Johnston has a brief encounter with a young male hitchhiker for whom he buys a sandwich, but then makes an awkward comment how the hiker, who has been brought up in a Fatherless setting, must think Don is his Father! This goes over about as poorly as every other attempt at expression by Johnston throughout the film. It now becomes clear that while Don’s perception of everyone from his past as blatantly neurotic is pretty accurate, Don Johnston himself, with the romantic supports of his youth withdrawn and standing lost perilously in traffic, is also himself a pretty spurious and expendable character in the eyes of the world, or at least for the moment his odyssey has brought him to that pass. Don ultimately returns home without solving the mystery but realizing that his past is lost irretrievably. |
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009)Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 |
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A young boy named Darren Shan meets a mysterious man at a freak show who turns out to be a Vampire. After a series of events Darren must leave his normal life and go on the road with the Cirque Du Freak and become a Vampire. |
