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dennispschaefer
Reviews
The Living and the Dead (2016)
Irish Poetry in Motion
Watching all the characters in this story wrestle with serious demons is something usually done with such crudity, vulgarity, and psychological or religious authoritarianism.
Instead we see a Monet or Degas painting that affirms the continuity between medieval superstition and modern angst, It is a rare person who could fail to appreciate such an emotional evocation of the juncture between science, religion, superstition, identity.
My only regret is that there was no second season, but then again, that last hint of what might have been.was a mind bender. Maybe BBC will do a re-think on the cancellation?
Nomads (1986)
The illusion of selfhood
Is the consciousness attached to one's body? Or is it also attached to physical spaces? What happens when one makes a major change in location?
A French anthropologist who has relocated to Los Angeles finds that he has not only lost a part of himself (his consciousness, or maybe even his soul). At the same time, in reattaching to a new place, he is now sharing his consciousness (maybe his soul?) with disturbing remnants of earlier occupants of his new place.
Calling these newcomers "ghosts" doesn't really tell us much about the scrambled brain psychology that flows from that experience. But "A Turn of the Screw", and the film "A Ghost Story" certainly dovetail nicely with this creepy and mysterious phenomenon. And the dead French anthropologist continues to scientifically study the same puzzle in the afterlife, only now as a western American biker off in search of those remnants who drove him into madness.
The Red Badge of Courage (1974)
Powerful, Disturbing, Profound
I'm still in shock over the fact that I never saw or heard of this film, in spite of the fact that I rank the novel up there with "Farewell to Arms" and "The Great Gatsby".
Stephen Crane is one of the best writers in American literature. Like his friend and contemporary, Henry James, he was not a realist or a naturalist exactly, but more of an impressionist whose work consisted of capturing the exact feeling of any scene he created at that precise moment to the character he was depicting.
He prefigured Hemingway (who thought Crane the best) and Fitzgerald, as they wrestled their way through humanly non-heroic characters ripped up by ironic tragedy.