Category Archives: Movies

MUSICAL MONDAY: Hitting Life’s Highest Notes …

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This is not my typical post for Musical Monday, but I was so charmed by this six-minute moving-image film – you will be too – that I had to share it here. The mood music background is by composer Gary Malkin. “He is founder of Musaic and Wisdom of the World™, a life-enhancing media production company and web site. He is also the co-founder of Care for the Journey, a groundbreaking care-for-the-caregiver initiative for health care professionals.” MORE

Louie Schwartzberg, the film-maker, is an American and well-known for his time-lapse photography. The short-film here is one of several – each with a different theme – which you can find on YouTube. If you can’t get access to YouTube, this film and The Hidden Beauty of Pollination are both available on the TED talks site.

BROTHER DAVID STEINDL-RAST (b. 1926)

Viennese, Catholic Benedictine Monk

The wise and gentle narrative is the gift of the very dear Br. David Steindl-Rast. Br. Steindl-Rast is notable for his work fostering dialogue among the faiths and for exploring the congruence between science and spirituality. Early in his career he was officially designated by his abbot to pursue Buddhist-Christian dialogue. He studied with several well-known Zen Masters. He is the author of feature articles, chapter contributions to collections, and books. Among the most notable are Belonging to the Universe (with Frijof Capra) and The Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey Through the Hours of the Day (with Sharon Lebell). Br. Stendl-Rast is the co-founder of A Network for Greatful Living, dedicated to the life-transforming character of gratitude.

© 2011, Jamie Dedes All rights reserved

Video uploaded to YouTube by 

Photo credit ~ Br. David Steindl-Rast, courtesy of Verena Kessler. She has released the photograph into the public domain.

THE LAST CARRIER PIGEON

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“This is a fundraising promo video for The Last Passenger Pigeon: Species Extinction and Survival in the 21st Century. This documentary will recount the total destruction by humans of the most abundant bird species in North America, and possibly the world.

2014 will mark the centennial of the birds’ extinction. The film will explore how this event occurred and put it in context of today’s conservation challenges and accelerated species extinctions. We are planning a multi-media event: a television documentary broadcast, the publishing of a book, River of Shadows: The Life and Times of the Passenger Pigeon, by Joel Greenberg, and a national educational outreach campaign known as Project Passenger Pigeon. The outreach component is led by Greenberg and David Blockstein, Senior Scientist at the National Council for Science and the Environment, and a diverse consortium of over 20 American and Canadian institutions, scientists, scholars and authors, with the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum/Chicago Academy of Sciences as the lead sponsoring institution.

The promo includes roughed out scenes such as a storyboard for a live action and computer animation depiction of the pigeons as experienced by John Audubon, preliminary interviews and scenes that begin to tell the story of the pigeon.

For more information contact: dmrazek@sbcglobal.net”  video and narrative courtesy of David Mrazek 

MARTHA

The Last Passenger Pigeon

“In 1857, a bill was brought forth to the Ohio State Legislature seeking protection for the Passenger Pigeon. A Select Committee of the Senate filed a report stating “The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced.”

Fifty-seven years later, on September 1, 1914, Martha, the last known Passenger Pigeon, died in the Cincinnati Zoo,Cincinnati, Ohio. Her body was frozen into a block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian Institution, where it was skinned and mounted. Currently, Martha (named after Martha Washington) is in the museum’s archived collection, and not on display.A memorial statue of Martha stands on the grounds of the Cincinnati Zoo.” Wikipedia

Photo credit ~ Public domain photograph (1914)  via Wikipedia

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE

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Video posted to YouTube by . 

Happy Musical Monday:

Sountrack by Max Steiner (1888-1971), Austrian-American composer/musician

Happy Halloween:

Arsnic and Old Lace (1944)

This is a Halloween tale of Brooklyn, where anything can happen and usually does.” among the opening titles to the Frank Capra movie, Arsenic and Old Lace.

Set in Brooklyn, New York in 1941, this movie  - good fun for Halloween – is funny in the kind of corny benign way that some of these old moves were.  Starring Cary Grant and Priscilla Lane, it is based on a Joseph Kesserling play, which ran from January 1941 through June 1944.  Jean Adair, Josephine Hull, and John Alexander who starred in the play were released to act their parts in the movie.  And, no – I don’t remember that – my mother told me. Boris Karloff played the evil brother in the play. He was the play’s biggest draw, but producers wouldn’t release Karloff for the movie. Hence, in the movie version the evil brother is played by a gruesome Raymond Massey. Some of the fun and several quirky quips in the movie reference that switch.

The story is about a theatre critic (Mortimer Brewster) who is also a critic of marriage. He finally falls for a  woman who lives in Brooklyn right next door to his two aunts and a cemetery (Gravesend maybe?). The aunts, as it happens, very kindly murder lonely old men and bury them in the basement  of their home.  The “weapon” of choice is elderberry wine laced with arsenic. The aunts are helped with the burial chores and ceremonies by Mortimer’s nutty brother Teddy, who thinks he is Theodore Roosevelt. When Mortimer discovers a body in the window box and evil brother Jonathan arrives on the scene ready to kill Mortimer and put the aunts at risk, hysteria breaks loose.

Added value for Brooklynites and/or B-ball fans: You get a glimpse of the old Brooklyn Dodgers in the opening scene.

It had good reviews in it’s day. More contemporary reviews are a bit reserved. I like it. I watch it every year on Halloween; and, frankly, I’ll take humor over horror anyday … even if it is a bit outdated.

© review, Jamie Dedes, 2011 All rights reserved