February 24, 2007

Amazing Grace and William Wilberforce

I look forward to seeing Amazing Grace: The Movie, a movie about William Wilberforce, either in the local theater or on DVD (I've popped it into my Netflix queue!) The review of Amazing Grace in the NY Times was lukewarm. Wilberforce's life and example have intrigued me since I first read Every Arrow Needs a Bow: William Wilberforce almost 10 years ago.
Posted by rdhyee at 12:21 PM

January 10, 2006

Ballets Russes

On Saturday, Laura and I saw the film Ballets Russses. It was not our first choice; we had ended up at the Shattuck Cinemas mistakenly looking for another movie. I was so pleased to see Ballets Russes. I expected to like movie but did not come prepared to be moved to tears. It turns out that I'm not the only one who was moved by the film. Joining many other critics, A. O. Scott of The New York Times called it "a moving, invigorating elegy to the civilization that sustained it." I had the feeling that because the movie tapped into a lot of my particular interests and current "issues," I found Ballets Russes to be even more affecting than a typical viewer dialing into the universal themes of the fragility and timelessness of beauty, the redemption of suffering, the folly of power struggles and giant egos, the tradeoffs between age and youth, the desire to make art (and all that other stuff.)

On a more prosaic front, I've noticed that the Wikipedia article on the Ballets Russes does not mention the movie -- and that there is no article on the movie so far. Time to correct these deficiencies?

Posted by rdhyee at 10:05 AM