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[See “Avatar and the Flight from Reality” in The New Atlantis of Spring, 2010, under “Articles,” April 29, 2010]
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[See “Avatar and the Flight from Reality” in The New Atlantis of Spring, 2010, under “Articles,” April 29, 2010]
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Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol is one of those hokey “futuristic” flicks which is really a form of pandering to a very present-day paranoia. It does not exactly require a huge leap of imagination to project a “not-too-distant future” in which gene-typing has become so swift and reliable that state security will have…
A Norwegian film whose amusing qualities are the spoonful of sugar that helps the message-medicine go down
Al Gore may turn out to be like Richard Nixon, as some are predicting, by running again in 2008, but Nixon was never this phony
Near the end of Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro), Marcel Camus’s masterpiece of 1959, there comes what can only be described as an authorial disclaimer that strikes the film’s one seriously false note. “The happiness of the poor is the great illusion of Carnival,” we are told, more or less out of the blue. Up until…
What might have been devastating satire becomes just a funny movie about crazy people — not that that’s nothing
Le Mépris, or Contempt, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, was directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1963, but has just been re-released in a newly refurbished print. Michel Piccoli stars as Paul, a Communist playwright being wooed by a dumb American millionaire called Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance) to re-write a script for a film…
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