Happy Birthday My Friend on Sunday 11th August 2013
Created For My Friend On Her Birthday
Love Jennifer
Jk ‘the secret keeper’
Posted On Sunday 11th August 2013
A Writer’s Word

A Rainbow Circle For You, Love Jennifer
Happy Birthday

Temporal Distortion

Happy Birthday
I Wish I Could Give You
A Birthday Bear Hug
But I Guess These
Will Have To Do.
xoxoxoxoxoxox, Love, Jennifer

Happy Birthday Fairy Style

Words Streaming With Hidden Meaning
By Jennifer Kiley
Written 2012

Words Stringing Together
Meaning-Intimacy-Attachment-Special
Needing-Wanting-Any Order Will Do
The Eternal Definition:
[place your order] One With Everything [think about it]
Find Peace In Breathing Deeply
Writing-Star Light-Infinite Space
Love-Give-Give To You
Dream-Vision-Woman-Be Yourself
Be One-Love One-Love All-In Peace
Night-Time-Space Travel-All Is One
Be Here Now

© jennifer kiley 2013

A Rose For You by Leo Savitsky It’s Magical & Mystical Just Like You, Love Jk

Kindred Spirits
by Jennifer Kiley

Long ago in times past we met
You were known to me as another
And I found in you a stranger
Who I let into my life
You needed my help
It was offered and accepted

Slowly your newness wore off
Revealed was a gentle spirit
With the talent to move creation
You were a pagan, loving nature

We lived in hidden places
Being searched out by danger
We ended protecting the other
Finding closeness in our plight
Guarded by protective spirits

We found solace in one another
Your eyes watched over me
As mine watched over you
Our closeness grew with time
Our journeys had merged
Out of safety and from love
Our souls were joining
In mutual compassion
We became one

© jennifer kiley 2013

Love is…
by jayarrarr

Love walks a tightrope barefoot over a bottomless pit
engulfed in flames and never looks back.

Love conjures a smile through tears.

Love believes impossible things are possible.

Love is truth, and as such, is sometimes painful.

Love is necessary.

Love is the beauty that shines through cracks
in imperfectly broken things.

Love is hanging your arm out of an open car window
on a hot summer’s day road trip
and pretending to fly.

Love whispers “it gets better”.

Love makes you cry at weddings
and laugh at funerals.

Love pushes you, challenges you,
refuses to let you compromise.

Love never backs down no matter
how hard you fight.

Love is that one song you play over and over
a hundred times and never get tired of.

Love takes charge when you’ve lost all hope,
and makes sure you keep going.

Love thinks you’re amazing
and doesn’t give a fuck
how depressed, angry, ugly,
or stupid you feel.

Love is lightning bugs.

Love is spinning ‘round and ‘round
in circles until you fall down.

Love is the wave that knocks you off
your feet when your back is turned.

Love is stubborn,
and won’t take “no” for an answer.

Love is fearless.

Love is also blind, deaf, and dumb –
and that’s a good thing.

Peter Pan — Happy Birthday

love is…

My Thoughts Are With You Today

Birthday Fairy In Magical Forest

Amazing Visions

European Architecture — Night Vision

Abstract Tree of Black and White by Mark Chapwick

Love is…
Written by Jennifer Kiley
23rd July 2012

Love is…mysterious.

Love is…unconditional.

Love is…something that can take your breath away.

Love is…expected to be given to a baby when s/he is born.

Love is…spiritually powerful.

Love is…nurturing.

Love is…good.

Love is…a feeling.

Love is…falling into a pleasant state of ecstasy.

Love is…pure.

Love is…passionate.

Love is…spoken in poetic words that have no limit in the ways they are expressed.

Love is…what you feel for a friend one cares about in a gentle way.

Love is…gentle.

Love is…written about by all poets and writers.

Love is…the best part of most plays written by Shakespeare.

Love is…the most misunderstood communication between people.

Love is…an incredibly powerful word.

Love is…a feeling of intense devotion and heartfelt emotion for someone.

Love is…an intense word used when there are emotional feelings for someone special.

Love is…not something that can be easily explained. and you don’t truly know what it is until it happens to you.

Love is…a strong feeling of affection towards another.

Love is…talking on Skype and not wanting to end chat.

Love is…the happiest feeling in the world…it is better to have loved then to never loved at all.

Love is…a force of nature which, like any other natural phenomenon, cannot be civilized, contained or contended…a force which cannot be controlled, avoided, destroyed or escaped.

Love is…an emotion usually described as ‘indescribable’ because you cannot find the right word to match your feeling of being completely and utterly captivated by someone.

Love is…something too complicated to define according to The Encyclopedia Britannica.

Love is…an amazing feeling that almost makes your heart burst with this overwhelming passion for someone.

Love is…passion, romance. a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person.

Love is…a feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person.

Love is…a zero score in tennis.

Love is…what drives you.

Love is…a great victory of human imagination over intelligence.

Love is…a rare psychological malfunction caused by an undetermined amount of interaction with another person.

Love is…someone making your heart smile, and making it sing with such exuberance that it will skip a beat from time to time.

Love is…healing.

Love is…comforting.

Love is…something that has made people insanely, foolishly, abnormally euphoric.

Love is…the ability to send one on an indescribable high, and make everything and anything so much better.

Love is…something that makes the world around you much more colourful, the people, much nicer, the conversations more insightful.

Love is…something with a shocking contrast, brought out by the darker side in us all, where people have murdered for love, stolen, hurt, and abused but I am not sure this really speaks for love but is a distortion and delusional interpretation of what love is and I felt it needed to be mentioned.

Love is…something that has sparked wars, and ended feuds, love has hurt, and love has healed, love has driven humankind to dizzying extremes, only to abruptly bring one back around.

Love is…an incredibly powerful word and emotion.

Love is…painful.

Love is…losing someone you love to the hands of death.

Love is…holding a warm, fluffy, purring kitty in your arms and they look up into your eyes, reflecting back the love you feel for them.

Love is…when you can feel comfortable being around that person you are with, no matter how you look, what you are wearing or if you are naked.

Love is…unconditional affection with no limits or conditions: completely loving someone.

Love is…an unconditional feeling that is felt, simply by being around her.

Love is…the absolute devotion you feel towards someone.

Love is…fierce.

Love is…when you realize you want to be with someone forever.

Love is…when you find something that you cannot live without or ever wish to be without.

Love is…something we think about, sing about, dream about, lose sleep worrying about it.

Love is…something when we don’t have it; we search for it; when we discover it; we don’t know what to do with it; when we have it; we fear losing it.

Love is…a constant source of pleasure and pain, but we can’t predict which it will be from one moment to the next.

Love is…a short word, easy to spell, difficult to define, impossible to live without.

Love is…to give all of yourself to a person-s-cause and to expect nothing back.

Love is…a mental-physical-spiritual thing beyond human comprehension.

Love is…something that surpasses all understanding.

Love is…patient.

Love is…kind and envies no one.

Love is…never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude; never selfish, nor quick to take offense.

Love is…a feeling that delights in the truth.

Love is…something that can face anything.

Love is…limitless in its faith, its hope, and its endurance.

Love is…something that lasts forever.

Love is…saying that you care deeply about another person.

Love is…giving someone the power to destroy you, and trusting them not to.

Love is…the desire to blend with their soul.

Love is…something that will make you do anything.

Love is…intense and passionate.

Love is…something that makes everything seem brighter, happier and more wonderful.

Love is…caring deeply about another person.

Love is…when every time you see this person you get butterflies in your stomach.

[this one is extra special for your birthday]
Love is…like being in wonderland without the red queen. Sometimes everything makes sense, other times no one cares.

© jennifer kiley 2013

I Just Called To Say I Love You-Stevie Wonder

Seasons of Our Dreams
By Jennifer Kiley
August 2013

Delicate will we prance on softness of grass;
leaves that trees must shed and piles
for the child within to crash upon;
angels in white falling into drops
of flaked, crystallized rain;
return of green from smallest sprout
one moment and blooming shades of gleaming greens
and flowers multiplying colours across the fields;
we travel round the seasons of our dreams
and moments found where love is felt
from tender shades of changes in our heart and soul;
we flow and go along in joy and bliss.

© jennifer kiley 2013

Roue de la Fortune — Souhait— Les Rêves se Réalisent par j. kiley © jennifer kiley 2013

To Make You Chuckle. Jk

Favorite Top Ten Films of All Time [#8 & #7]
List Created by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
Movie Trailers by Jk the secret keeper
Post Created on 21st August 2013
Posted On Friday 23rd August 2013
FILM FRIDAY

Favorite Top Ten Films of All Time [#10 & #9]
List Created by Jennifer Kiley

Most everyone knows the Shakespearean story of Romeo & Juliet. The contention between their families, the Montague’s and the Capulet’s. The opening lines of the play are:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
Romeo and Juliet (1.1)

Well, remember this play as you watch the film West Side Story and you observe the disenfranchised youth of the Jets and the misplaced youth of the Sharks whose families have come from Puerto Rico to find a life in America. Instead find themselves unwelcome as we see today how anyone who is different and from the wrong country is unwelcome today. How quickly all of our ancestry forget we are and were all aliens at one time. This is how it is played out in West Side Story. You find gangs formed so young people feel they belong to something.

In Romeo and Juliet, you have large families formed through birth and through marriage. Loyalty is to the family and its extensions. Romeo unknowingly falls in love with the daughter of his families enemy and Juliet, likewise, does the same by falling in love with Romeo, the son of his families enemy. They were doomed from the start as are Tony, a former member of the Jets, and Maria, sister to the leader of the gang the Sharks. Enemies guarding territory, the Jets and the Sharks. Neither Maria or Tony could care about this territory or that they are different in race or side of a battlefield.

I will let Roger Ebert guide you through his thoughts on West Side Story. It was the first film I saw in a movie theatre on my own as a young girl. I saw the film win the Oscar for Best Picture and a number of other awards. Somewhere, one of the many beautiful songs Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim created, has been my favorite song. It was my graduation song from eighth grade and it’s a perfect song for those people who feel different. To be it is the anthem of being Gay and Lesbian and Transgender or differences of any kind. “There’s a place for us, somewhere, someday.”

I will turn it over to Roger Ebert now. I like using his reviews. It keeps him alive for me. When I wanted to know about a film I would always go to his web page to read his reviews. It gave me a good sense of the film. I didn’t always agree with him but why should I. I think for myself. Roger Ebert wouldn’t have it any other way. So Here’s Roger… by Jennifer Kiley

#8th — West Side Story

West Side Story
Roger Ebert
February 15, 2004

Although “West Side Story” was named the best picture of 1961 and won 10 Academy Awards, it is not much mentioned by movie fans these days, and the old warhorse “Singin’ in the Rain” is probably more seen and certainly better loved.

“West Side Story” was the kind of musical people thought was good for them, a pious expression of admirable but unrealistic liberal sentiments, and certainly its street gangs at war — one Puerto Rican, one the descendants of European immigrants — seem touchingly innocent compared to contemporary reality.

I hadn’t seen it since it was released in 1961, nor had I much wanted to, although I’ve seen “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Swing Time,” “Top Hat,” “My Fair Lady” and “An American in Paris” countless times during those years. My muted enthusiasm is shared. Although “West Side Story” placed No. 41 in the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest films of all time, the less industry-oriented voters at the Internet Movie Database don’t even have it in the top 250.

Still, the new two-disc restored edition of the movie inspired me to look at it again, and I think there are great things in the movie, especially some of the songs of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, the powerful performances by Rita Moreno and George Chakiris, and above all Jerome Robbins’ choreography. It is a great movie … in parts. Mainstream critics loved it in 1961. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times thought its message “should be heard by thoughtful people — sympathetic people — all over the land.”

What is the message? Doc, the little Jewish candy store owner, expresses it to warring street gangs: “You kids make this world lousy! When will you stop?” It’s a strong moment, and Ned Glass’ Doc is one of the most authentic characters in the film, but really: Has a racist ever walked into a movie and been converted by a line of dialogue? Isn’t this movie preaching to the choir?

The scenario by Arthur Laurents is famously inspired by Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” although it shies away from the complete tragedy of the original by fudging the ending. It is not a cosmic misunderstanding but angry gunfire that kills Tony, and Maria doesn’t die at all; she snatches the gun and threatens to shoot herself, but drops it — perhaps because suicide would have been too heavy a load for the movie to carry. Then as now, there is a powerful bias in show business toward happy endings.

Such lapses seemed crucial to the best critics reviewing the movie. Although Stanley Kauffmann named “West Side Story” “the best film musical ever made” when it came out in 1961, the rest of his review seemed to undermine that claim; he said it lacks a towering conclusion, is useless and facile as sociology, and the hint of a reconciliation between the two gangs at the end is “utter falseness.” Pauline Kael’s review scorched the earth: The movie was “frenzied hokum,” the dialogue was “painfully old-fashioned and mawkish,” the dancing was “simpering, sickly romantic ballet,” and the “machine-tooled” Natalie Wood was “so perfectly banal she destroys all thoughts of love.”

Kael is guilty of overkill. Kauffmann is closer to the mark, especially when he disagrees with Kael about the dancing. Robbins, one of the most original choreographers in Broadway history, at first refused to work on the film unless he could direct it. Producer Walter Mirisch wanted a steady Hollywood hand, and chose Robert Wise, the editor of “Citizen Kane” and a studio veteran. Robbins agreed to direct the dancing, and Wise would direct the drama. And then the problem became that Robbins simply could not stop directing the dancing: “He didn’t know how to say ‘cut,’” one of the dancers remembers in a documentary about the making of the film. Robbins ran up so much overtime he was eventually fired, but his assistants stayed, and all the choreography is his.

Certainly the dance scenes, so robust, athletic and exhilarating, play differently after you’ve seen the doc. Robbins rehearsed for three months before the shooting began, then revised everything on the locations, sometimes many times. His choreography was so demanding that no scene was ever filmed all the way through, and dancers in the “Cool” number say they never before and never again worked harder on anything. There were injuries, collapses, setbacks.

Look at a brief scene where a gang runs toward a very high chain-link fence, scales it bare-handed, and drops down inside a playground. That’s a job for one stuntman, not a dozen dancers, and we can only guess how many takes it took to make it look effortless and in sync with the music.

As for the music itself: Usually, says Rita Moreno, dancers work in counts of fours, or sixes, or eights. “Then along comes Leonard Bernstein with his 5/4 time, his 6/8 time, his 25/6 time. It was just crazy. It’s very difficult to dance to that kind of music, because it doesn’t make dancer sense.” And yet Robbins’ perfectionism and Bernstein’s unconventional rhy-thms created a genuinely new kind of movie dancing, and it can be said that if street gangs did dance, they would dance something like the Jets and the Sharks in this movie, and not like a Broadway chorus line.

The movie was made fresh on the heels of the enormous Broadway success of the musical, and filmed partly on location in New York (it opens on the present site of Lincoln Center), partly on sound stages. There was controversy over the casting of Natalie Wood as Maria (she was not Puerto Rican, her voice was dubbed by Marnie Nixon, she was only a fair dancer) and some indifference to Richard Beymer, whose Tony played more like a leading man than a gang leader. They didn’t get along in real life, we learn, but Wood does project warmth and passion in their scenes together, and a beauty and sweetness that would be with her all through her career.

What shows up Wood and Beymer is the work of Moreno and Chakiris, as the Puerto Rican lovers Anita and Bernardo. Little wonder they won supporting Oscars and the leads did not. Moreno can sing, can dance, and exudes a passion that brings special life to her scenes. For me, the most powerful moments in the movie come when Anita visits Doc’s candy store to bring a message of love from Maria to Tony — and is insulted, shoved around and almost raped by the Jets. That leads her, in anger, to abandon her romantic message and shout out that Maria is dead — setting the engine of Shakespeare’s last act into motion in a way that makes perfect dramatic sense. To study the way she plays in that scene is to understand what Wood’s performance is lacking.

Kael is right about the dialogue. It’s mostly pedestrian and uninspired; it gets the job done and moves the plot along, but lacks not only the eloquence and poetry of Shakespeare, but even the power that a 20th century playwright like O’Neill or Williams would have brought to it. Compare the balcony scene in “West Side Story” with the one filmed six years later by Franco Zeffirelli in “Romeo and Juliet,” and you will find that it is possible to make a box-office hit while still using great language.

What I loved during “West Side Story,” and why I recommend it, is the dancing itself. The opening finger-snapping sequence is one of the best uses of dance in movie history. It came about because Robbins, reading the screenplay, asked, “What are they dancing about?”

The writer Laurents agreed: “You couldn’t have a story about murder, violence, prejudice, attempted rape, and do it in a traditional musical style.” So he outlined the prologue, without dialogue, allowing Robbins to establish the street gangs, show their pecking order, celebrate their swagger in the street, demonstrate their physical grace, and establish their hostility — all in a ballet scored by Bernstein with music, finger-snapping and anger.

The prologue sets up the muscular physical impact of all of the dancing, and Robbins is gifted at moving his gangs as units while still making every dancer seem like an individual. Each gang member has his own style, his own motivation, and yet as the camera goes for high angles and very low ones, the whole seems to come together. I was reminded of the physical choreography in another 1961 movie, Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo,” in which a band of samurai move quickly and swiftly through action with a snakelike coordination.

So the dancing is remarkable, and several of the songs have proven themselves by becoming standards, and there are moments of startling power and truth. “West Side Story” remains a landmark of musical history. But if the drama had been as edgy as the choreography, if the lead performances had matched Moreno’s fierce concentration, if the gangs had been more dangerous and less like bad-boy Archies and Jugheads, if the ending had delivered on the pathos and tragedy of the original, there’s no telling what might have resulted. The movie began with a brave vision, and it is best when you sense that vision surviving the process by which it was turned into safe entertainment.

Somewhere — West Side Story — Video Created by Jennifer Kiley

AFI #2 AFI’s Greatest Movie Musicals – West Side Story (1961)

#7th — Philadelphia Story

Keep in mind as you read the review, it was written back the the 1940s when The Philadelphia Story was first released. It is a brilliantly funny, well written, well acted film. The cast is filled with three of the best actors of all time, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart. Whether the Lord family are wealthy does not play into the enjoyment you get from watching this film. It is the sheer delight of the interaction between the characters that hold your attention.

It is watching the coming to life of Tracy Lord’s emotional connection with people which is fascinating to watch. Also, the knocking off his horse, a bore of a fiance Tracy is expected to marry by the end of the film. So enjoy a review from the time before TV, when movies were the thing to see for entertainment. Studios thought Katherine Hepburn was box office poison.

One of my pet peeves with that era and now that if you stumble without complete success in everything you do, somehow you are automatically considered a failure. How does one learn what is enjoyable or until they try it out? If it doesn’t work then you try something different. Not everyone can be completely perfect all the time.

Now onto the interview of The Philadelphia Story as seen through the eyes of someone there when it first hit the theatre and when a film stayed in the theatres for years, especially if it was a great film, as The Philadelphia Story is.

Jimmy Stewart won an Oscar for his performance. Katherine Hepburn received so many nominations in her lifetime, one of them could have been for this film. No mention of it though. If she didn’t, let me say, she should have. by Jennifer Kiley

The Philadelphia Story (1940)
THE SCREEN; A Splendid Cast Adorns the Screen Version
of ‘The Philadelphia Story’ at the Music Hall
By BOSLEY CROWTHER
Published: December 27, 1940

All those folks who wrote Santa Claus asking him to send them a sleek new custom-built comedy with fast lines and the very finest in Hollywood fittings got their wish just one day late with the opening of “The Philadelphia Story” yesterday at the Music Hall. For this present, which really comes via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, has just about everything that a blue-chip comedy should have—a witty, romantic script derived by Donald Ogden Stewart out of Philip Barry’s successful play; the flavor of high-society elegance, in which the patrons invariably luxuriate, and a splendid cast of performers headed by Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart and Cary Grant. If it doesn’t play out this year and well along into next they should turn the Music Hall into a shooting gallery.

It has been a long time since Hollywood has spent itself so extravagantly, and to such entertaining effect, upon a straight upper-crust fable, an unblushing apologia for plutocracy. Money and talent are mostly going these days into elaborate outdoor epics and rugged individualist films.

It is like old times to see one about the trials and tribulations of the rich, and to have Miss Hepburn back, after a two-year recess, as another spoiled and willful daughter of America’s unofficial peerage, comporting herself easily amid swimming pools, stables and the usual appurtenances of a huge estate.

For that is what she is—and does—in the Messrs. Stewart’s and Barry’s pleasant dissertation upon a largely inconsequential subject, that subject being the redemption of a rather priggish and disagreeable miss. The writers have solemnly made her out as a frigid and demanding sort of person—one of “a special class of American females: the married maidens”—who has divorced her first husband and is preparing to take unto herself another simply because she doesn’t understand her own psyche.

But an amusing complication, whereby an ink-smeared journalist and a girl photographer turn up to “cover” her wedding for a “snoop” magazine leads to a strange exposure of her basic hypocrisy, and she remarries the proper man to the proper effect.

Truthfully, the psychology of the story is as specious as a spiel, and, for all the talk about the little lady being “a sort of high priestess to a virgin goddess,” etc., she is and remains at the end what most folks would call a plain snob. But the way Miss Hepburn plays her, with the wry things she is given to say, she is an altogether charming character to meet cinematically. Some one was rudely charging a few years ago that Miss Hepburn was “box-office poison.” If she is, a lot of people don’t read labels—including us.

But she isn’t the only one who gives a brilliant performance in this film. James Stewart, as the acid word-slinger, matches her poke for gibe all the way and incidentally contributes one of the most cozy drunk scenes with Miss Hepburn we’ve ever seen. Cary Grant, too, is warmly congenial as the cast of but undefeated mate, and Ruth Hussey, Virginia Weidler, Roland Young and Mary Nash add much to the merriment.

Provided you have a little patience for the lavishly rich, which these folk are, you should have great fun at “The Philadelphia Story.” For Metro and Director George Cukor have graciously made it apparent, in the words of a character, that one of “the prettiest sights in this pretty world is the privileged classes enjoying their privileges.” And so, in this instance, will you, too.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY; screen play by Donald Ogden Stewart; based on the play by Philip Barry; directed by George Cukor; produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. At the Radio City Music Hall.

Cast of The Philadelphia Story

C. K. Dexter Haven . . . . . Cary Grant
Tracy Lord . . . . . Katharine Hepburn
Macaulay Connor . . . . . James Stewart
Elizabeth Imbrie . . . . . Ruth Hussey
George Kittredge . . . . . John Howard
Uncle Willie . . . . . Roland Young
Seth Lord . . . . . John Halliday
Margaret Lord . . . . . Mary Nash
Dinah Lord . . . . . Virginia Weidler
Sidney Kidd . . . . . Henry Daniell
Edward . . . . . Lionel Pape
Thomas . . . . . Rex Evans

The Philadelphia Story [HD] 1941
Starring: Katherine Hepburn-Cary Grant-Jimmy Stewart

Favorite Top Ten Films of All Time #6
List Created by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
Movie Trailers by Jk the secret keeper
Post Created on 21st August 2013
Posted On Friday 30th August 2013
FILM FRIDAY

Favorite Top Ten Films of All Time [#6]
List Created by Jennifer Kiley

I made a decision doing two films from my Favorite and Best 10 films per week was overwhelming to myself and to the readers of my post. It is far to much to absorb and create at one time. The focus gets to distracting. So it will be one film per week which will extend the length of time to present the 20 films all together. I do have a surprise when the Favorite Top Ten and Best Top Ten Films have been revealed and reviewed with trailers, photos and posters. I hope when we get their it will be a good surprise and enlightening. Until then, tonight’s Favorite Top Ten Film at # 6 is another Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant film which is so moving and enjoyable. It is ‘Holiday.’ I am not sure how many have heard or seen this film but it is a film about individuality and believing strongly in your own thoughts, who you are and believing in your future, not one someone else chooses for you, no matter what the bribery may be, you stay true to yourself.

HOLIDAY
(1938) Director: George Cukor. Cast: Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Doris Nolan, Lew Ayres, Edward Everett Horton, Jean Dixon, Henry Kolker, Henry Daniell, Binnie Barnes. Screenplay: Donald Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman (based on the play by Philip Barry). © 1938 Columbia Pictures

“

I have not had a good week. I wouldn’t even say I have had a great year. Beyond that, I would certainly say the movies have not had a great year—and why is it, we cinephiles frequently ask ourselves, that a coincidence like this never really feels like a coincidence? Has the drought at the multiplexes made 2003 rougher than it already was (which I’m not even going to get into), or—as I like to believe in my more romantic moments, blending my own life’s ups and downs with those of the medium I love—have those yearly slings and arrows only felt so wearying because there have been no good films to cushion the impact a little?

Chicken, egg, chicken, egg. I’m sure I’ll never get to the bottom of this personal riddle, and yet my basic thesis that there must be some connection was only reinforced last week when I lucked into a rare theatrical screening of a glorious print of a wonderful old film. It’s one of those banalities that gets endlessly repeated because really, it’s just true: a great movie can really lift the spirits, despite all the practical, external odds against it doing so.

The film in question was Holiday, a wondrous 1938 collaboration among those famous friends Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and George Cukor that nonetheless gets shockingly little attention and exposure. Much like Bringing Up Baby, Hepburn and Grant’s other co-starring vehicle from the same year, Holiday fizzled at the box office. Hepburn reteamed with the same costar, director, playwright, and screenwriter two years later for her career-reviving smash The Philadelphia Story, but the wild enthusiasm for that project somehow never translated into a deserved second chance for Holiday. In fact, Holiday already was a second chance, since it had been filmed before and with considerably greater box-office success in 1930, with the now-forgotten Ann Harding nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award as Linda Seton, the role Hepburn inherits in the remake.

Harding’s Holiday only exists these days as one ailing print housed in the Library of Congress and is rarely if ever trotted out for public viewing. The Hepburn-Grant version is more accessible, but not as much as you’d think: the programmers at Turner Classic Movies seem to like it, and yet video copies can be tough to locate, even for rental, DVDs are nonexistent as near as I can tell, and the movie often gets ousted from rep-house retrospectives of Hepburn’s and Grant’s personal portfolios in favor of more celebrated titles. Even Sylvia Scarlett, an even worse flop for the Hepburn-Grant-Cukor trio and much disliked by the actors themselves, stumbled into a cult-classic status that Holiday never really achieved: it remains, I’d say, the best Hepburn picture that her fans may not have seen, aside from that one incandescent shot of she and Grant in elegant white-tie regalia, striding swanlike over the back of a velvet couch.

What all this means is that to see Holiday at all these days, particularly on the big screen, is itself a sort of triumph over adversity. And what a triumph it is! The film is spellbinding without being a mystery, ravishing without being ornate, heartachy despite being a lovely comedy, and full of surprise gestures and unexpected flights of feeling and fancy that are unique even among the superior class of romantic ’30s films to which it rightfully belongs. The focal character is Grant’s Johnny Case, and yes, he is a dashing and puckish romantic clown with the cleftiest of clefted chins.

Still, though, without Alfred Hitchcock or Clifford Odets anywhere in sight, Grant explores new dimensions of his familiar persona in this part (and in 1938, his persona wasn’t all that familiar anyway; Hepburn, after all, despite her “box-office poison” reputation, is still billed first). Johnny is a laugher and a prankster, but there’s a strong and swift-acting business acumen lurking just beneath the devil-may-care surface. He’s in love with love, but there is gravity in that love: he is offended, even angered, when people do wrong by romantic ideals, and a few of his line readings genuinely bark and bristle in the face of generically familiar obstacles like obstreperous fathers-in-law and waspish relatives. Neither the film nor the character really depart from the known terrain of romantic comedy, but it feels like there’s more at stake in Holiday than a film of this type always suggests, which is largely the result of Grant’s swaggering, scintillating, but strongly backboned performance.

Meanwhile, Hepburn is flexing and sharpening her character just as deftly as Grant does his, but without losing any of that soft luminosity that Cukor was always so good at discovering in her hard-angled face. As Linda Seton, she is not the Grant character’s initial love interest; these two meet because Grant’s Johnny is engaged to Hepburn’s sister Julia, well played by an actress named Doris Nolan whom I’d frankly never heard of. It may feel like something of a foregone conclusion that Johnny’s affections will eventually be withdrawn from Julia and redirected toward Linda, but for a long time the reasons and logic by which this transfer will happen simply aren’t clear.

Barry’s play and the resultant script refuse to compromise in any of the familiar areas: Nolan’s Julia sours a little but she isn’t inscrutable or indefensible; Hepburn’s Linda is too loyal to and defensive of her sister, sometimes extravagantly so, to comfortably intrude on Julia’s amorous bliss; Grant’s Johnny is too pragmatic and driven, and too subliminally desirous of approval, to toss all other cares to the wind and ride off with the woman who’s easier, who’s more like him, who better understands his distinctive blend of confidence and abandon.

A lesser movie would invent some deus ex machina plot device to rearrange these characters where the final scene needs to find them. Holiday, enormously to its credit, never really does that. The characters all keep behaving according to their definitive patterns—laughing, debating, sobbing, drinking, somersaulting, kicking each other playfully in the behinds—and suddenly, at an invisible moment, a corner gets turned. Behavior is rather elaborate in this story, to include willful self-seclusions, impetuous disappearances, and public backflips. And the dialogue is such finely spun silver, glittering in its jokes but chilly, sometimes, in its sad ring, that these obvious pleasures alone seem like more than enough for one film, or for three.

But Holiday, and this is where Cukor comes in, manages by some sorcerous trick to foster another, ineffable level, a dimension that feels like pure feeling, quiet but tangible epiphanies, where the real action is really happening. A single scene in Holiday might comprise a puppet-show, an acrobatic exhibit (Grant and Hepburn are gloriously athletic), and a whole host of comic experts in the cast, including the perennial Edward Everett Horton and the touching Jean Dixon, firing off those great jests and jousts that none of us dumb louts can ever think of at the right, comparable moments in real life…and yet, with all this commotion and carrying-on, we realize that what the scene has really been about is a sea-change, a silent transmission, a feeling deep-hidden in Hepburn or Grant that passed, say, from curiosity to fascination, from flirtation to longing.

How does this happen? How are we made to feel it? Poignant, careful framings that measure the characters finely against the spaces (marginal, grand, intimate, echoey) they inhabit. Good sonic judgment that maintains a notable silence when most comedies would supply a fracas or a high, peppy glissando. Sleek, simple outfits that are tailored exactly right and then forgotten about—this isn’t an MGM movie. All of this used to be called good direction. At rare moments, when a Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me), a Curtis Hanson (Wonder Boys), or a Lukas Moodysson (Together) emerges, it still is. Some directors still remind us that humanism, naughty nostalgic word though it is, is still a style, and a fine one at that.

By whatever magical process, Holiday tells us a story that isn’t what we expect, because its methods for reaching a guessable conclusion are so creative, so boisterous, so deeply and manifestly felt by everyone involved. Why didn’t audiences in 1938 want to see this? Perhaps a film about wealthy people was a turn-off after a near-decade of economic debacle, but that didn’t stop many another Hollywood lark from sailing footloose and fancy-free into the public’s favor. Besides, Johnny’s and Linda’s and Julia’s relation to the wealth they have is sad and ambivalent and illuminating, without the film growing didactic or asking in some embarrassing way that we shed tears for the so-called idle rich. Holiday cuts through the tough interrelations of money, family, and feeling with a trenchancy that many, more dogmatic movies regularly fail to do; it certainly makes Kaufman and Hart’s beloved You Can’t Take It With You, which inspired that year’s Oscar winner as Best Picture, seem just as thin and flyaway as (admit it) you probably already suspected it was.

That, and Holiday is funny, an absolute gas. And it’s visually lovely. And it’s touching and compassionate. What else do we want out of movies? What else do we want out of life? Boy am I feeling better, and without feeling manhandled by the clumsy, unformed giddiness of Gumpish minds or the ungainly, audience-tested soothsayings of Something’s Gotta Give. Holiday is a holiday, and it arrived for me at just the right time—but truly, is there ever a wrong time for something this right? A

Favourite Moments — Holiday

Holiday 1938

Stars — A Video Tribute to Film — Holiday 1938

Scene from Holiday 1938

Breathe Slowly [Holiday 1938] Alesha Dixon

Favorite Top Ten Films of All Time [#5]
Breakfast at Tiffany’s: When Audrey Hepburn won Marilyn Monroe’s role
List Created by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
Movie Trailers by Jk the secret keeper
Post Created on 21st August 2013
Posted On Friday 23rd August 2013
FILM FRIDAY

Favorite Top Ten Films of All Time [#5]
List Created by Jennifer Kiley

#5th — Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Breakfast at Tiffany’s: When Audrey Hepburn won Marilyn Monroe’s role

How Truman Capote’s novella became a great Hollywood film by Sarah Churchwell

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Audrey Hepburn the perfect Holly Golightly in the film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s

This is a fascinating review. I do not agree Audrey was miscast but I do agree that she was perfect for the role of Holly Golightly. It is a moving, complicated, sad, romantic, thought provoking, amusing film, I feel one of Blake Edwards’ and Audrey Hepburn’s masterpieces. The review coming up by Sarah Churchwell was brilliantly thought out. And tells the tale well of Breakfast At Tiffany’s and the rebirth of two people who have had it rough in their lives. A worthy film to watch for enjoyment but also to find compassion for two lost souls and the learning to love and to feel like you can belong to something and someone. Not in a way that smothers but in a way that sets you free so you are able to love.

I must mention my two favorite scenes in the entire film, not that I didn’t love every scene. But there is a scene out on the fire escape when Holly is playing the guitar and singing Henry Mancini’s “Moon River,” it is so vulnerable a moment. If you are familiar with this song and have seen the film you understand why. The other scene is during a rainstorm, and Holly and Paul aka Fred are searching for something very precious. It makes you frantic and sad and angry all in one moment, through an entire scene. If you see the film for the first time, remember to look for these two scenes. There are plenty of other scenes that move you but not the same as these two.

All Marilyn Monroe fans will be interested in reading this review, also. It seems Truman Capote wrote the novella with her in mind to eventually play the role of Holly Golightly. I love Marilyn but somehow after seeing Audrey Hepburn imprint herself on this role. I cannot imagine Marilyn doing it at all. It doesn’t seem to fit in my mind. It would have been interesting to see her do it on the stage. That would have been a treat if I had been old enough back at the time Marilyn was alive. A note I found out after writing this is that Marilyn rejected doing the part because her coach felt the character was of ill repute and it wasn’t a good impression to make playing someone who people would see as a “whore.” Of course, the way Audrey Hepburn plays the role, one only sees Audrey being her admirable self in a character who is carefree on the outside and heartbroken and terrified of too close a relationship and commitment with anyone, man nor beast.

So enjoy reading a unique approach to Breakfast At Tiffany’s. I will leave you the words, it deserves to be on my Favorite Top Ten List of Films. I feel if you take the time to see Breakfast At Tiffany’s, you will feel the same. It is a delight to watch Audrey develop into a butterfly during the course of the film. Enjoy reading the rest of the review, the photographs, posters, movie trailer(s), interviews, and film clips, and a documentary on the making of Breakfast at Tuffany’s and in the documentary, the joy for Blake Edward fans, being able to see and him talk about a film he was extremely proud to be part of and his delightful in being the director. From my impression, Audrey and Blake had quite the interesting relationship.

I know that Blake’s wife Julie Andrews became friends with Audrey and the ordeal over Jack Warner choosing Audrey to play Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady was never really a problem between the two of them. In fact, Audrey told Julie she wouldn’t take the role if Julie didn’t want her to. But then she discovered that Jack Warner was never going to give the role to Julie ever. In fact, he went on to give the role of Guinevere in Camelot to Vanessa Redgrave. For those who don’t know Julie played both the roles on Broadway. So Audrey decided that if Julie was never to get the role then why not her play the role. She really wanted to do it.

Of course, once Audrey began the part, they decided not to let her sing. To me that is so bizarre to cast someone who can’t sing at the level the part called for seems rather ridiculous. If it is a a singing part, you hire an actor who can really sing. [I only say that now. I am grateful that Natalie Wood played the role of Maria in West Side Story but didn't get to sing either. It was usually Marni Nixon who dubbed for most of those females who couldn't do it.]

Now, I use to be so upset with Audrey until I discovered this information and that Julie was truly alright with Audrey playing Eliza. Now I am over it but I really would have liked to see Julie playing Eliza. If she had then what would have happened with Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music? I’m sure she would have done those roles but the timing would have been so off. Instead she gets an Oscar & Golden Globe for Mary Poppins and a nomination for Maria in The Sound of Music and best picture also. And she became the number one star for the 70s. Take that Jack Warner.

And now onto the intriguing review of Breakfast at Tiffany’s written in 2009 by the British Journalist for The Guardian, Sarah Churchwell. Introduction by Jennifer Kiley

Production year: 1961
Country: USA
Cert (UK): PG
Runtime: 115 mins
Director: Blake Edwards
Adapted from Novella Written by Truman Capote
Cast: Audrey Hepburn: Holly Golightly (money for the powder room)
George Peppard: Paul Varjak (kept man-writer-based on Truman Capote except that Truman was gay & Paul is not)Holly calls him Fred
Patricia Neal: (Paul’s designer/keeper)
Buddy Ebsen: Doc (Holly’s Husband-robbed the cradle-Holly ran away from that life)

Sarah Churchwell
The Guardian
Friday 4th September 2009

It doesn’t take much these days for a tale to be described as a “Cinderella story”: anything resembling a makeover, however superficial, will usually suffice. But Breakfast at Tiffany’s really is a variation on the Cinderella theme, the tale of a young girl who escapes a dangerous adolescence and transforms herself through aspiration – a sheer act of will – but who may not live happily ever after. Like Cinderella, it is a story about struggling to escape. And it is a story about self-fashioning. Breakfast at Tiffany’s suggests to every woman – and many of the men – in the audience that they could reinvent themselves, liberate the golden girl hidden beneath ordinary, even debased, trappings.



Much of the writing about the film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s acknowledges that when Hollywood bought the rights to the story, Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Holly Golightly. Most accounts treat this as yet another of Capote’s many idiosyncracies, if they consider it at all – who could imagine Monroe instead of Audrey Hepburn in one of her most iconic roles? But for anyone familiar with either Monroe or the novella, it’s not really that much of a stretch.

In fact, as many of the film’s first critics observed, Hepburn is entirely wrong for Holly, a character who turns out to be a vagrant from west Texas whose real name is Lulamae Barnes. It is difficult to conceive of a woman less likely ever to have been called Lulamae, let alone “a hillbilly or an Okie or what” (as Holly’s agent OJ Berman refers to Lulamae) than Audrey Hepburn. She could be an ingénue, a naif, anything French you like. But a redneck? A hick from a Texas dirt-farm? That’s even more implausible than Cary Grant as an Oregon lumberjack in To Catch a Thief some five years earlier. Every inch of Audrey Hepburn exudes aristocratic chic.

Monroe, by contrast, whom Capote knew well, though raised in California rather than Texas, was originally named Norma Jeane (with an E, like Lulamae), and her parallels with Capote’s Holly do not end there. She was a depression-era orphan who was both exploited and saved by older men. As an adult she would allude to childhood molestations (when reckoning how many lovers she’s had, Capote’s Holly dismisses “anything that happened before I was 13, because, after all, that just doesn’t count”). She has an upturned nose, tousled, “somewhat self-induced” short, blonde hair (“strands of albino-blonde and yellow”) and “large eyes, a little blue, a little green”.

She is befriended by an extremely short, powerful Hollywood agent who recognises her potential and helps her reinvent herself, renaming her and providing her with access to education and a more sophisticated veneer. She runs away to New York just as success in Hollywood seems assured – although Holly, unlike Monroe, knows she doesn’t have it in her to be a star, because she lacks the drive that precisely characterised Monroe (as Capote understood). Like Monroe, Holly is in it for the “self-improvement”, as she tells the narrator. She’s been around the block, for which she never apologises, and she ends as an icon, a fertility symbol (the narrator sees a picture of Holly carved as an African fetish). Most of all, Monroe, like Capote’s Holly, “is a phony. But on the other hand . . . she isn’t a phony because she’s a real phony”. The novella’s Holly, her agent knows, is “strictly a girl you’ll read where she ends up at the bottom of a bottle of Seconals”. Mind you, the novella was published in 1958: four years before Monroe ended up at the bottom of a bottle of Nembutals. It’s a fable about a Monroe manqué, who lacks her ambition – and may thus escape her fate.

[I do not agree with the statement Marilyn ended up at the bottom of a bottle of Nembutals. There are many theories which do not support that conclusion. It is possible some found Marilyn asleep after taking something to help her drop off. But I believe the Nembutals were introduced into her system in a manner where they would dissolve long enough to disappear from her system before an autopsy could be done. There were no Nembutal found in her system. Yet, she supposedly died from an overdose. Nothing she took herself. The amount which would have killed her she couldn't have taken without passing out before all the pills were swallowed. A curious dilemma, and also, her body had been moved from the location where she died and she was placed into her bed. She was found lying in the wrong position for the way the evidence was recorded. So, I object to the making of a comment about Marilyn "ending up at the bottom of a bottle of Nembutal." She didn't and I still believe someone took her life. There were too many reasons for others to have done it than for Marilyn to have been able to succeed at taking the lethal dose. My opinion by Jennifer Kiley]

Blake Edwards’s film adaptation was released in 1961, a little less than a year before Monroe died. And much to her disappointment, she didn’t win the part that had been written for, and about, her. Holly could have been the performance of a lifetime – as it would have been the performance of her lifetime. Moreover Holly, despite being blonde, is decidedly not dumb, and Monroe was desperate to escape being typecast.

But Hepburn won the part, and in retrospect it is easy to see why. Hepburn, far more than Monroe, had become indelibly associated with the transformative Cinderella makeover. Although Holly, like Monroe – and like Capote, in fact – all sprang from a Platonic conception of themselves (in F Scott Fitzgerald’s famous phrase), for them the fissures between the earlier self and the public persona always showed, and threatened to split them apart. Hepburn was the only one whose stardom seemed to reflect her authentic self – as if she were not an actor but a true princess, an authentic queen.

In one way, Capote was certainly an authentic queen. But he was never able to shed his sense of belonging on the margins. The neglected child from Louisiana, the prodigy who transformed himself into a celebrity, never believed that he belonged in the castle. As he wrote of his own alter ego, the unnamed narrator of Tiffany’s, he lived perpetually with “his nose pressed on the glass”, wanting “awfully to be on the inside staring out”. Capote, who was born Truman Parsons, was himself an aspiring Cinderella; like Holly he was renamed, reinvented, and left eternally waiting for the right fairy godmother.

Cinderella was not, originally, a poor child raised to the rank of princess. In the stories of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, Cinderella begins life in privilege and wealth – in earlier versions she’s even a princess – who is wrongly deprived of her rightful status by those who envy her power and beauty. It is less a story of metamorphosis than of revelation: the transformation only reveals the original self. On screen, we never saw Norma Jeane become Monroe: we knew her only after the fall. But for Hepburn, every definitive role leading up to Breakfast at Tiffany’s – and continuing to My Fair Lady – featured her being transformed, the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis. And unlike Monroe, who was always seen as having transformed into something artificial, Hepburn was only ever transformed back into her own luminous, immanent self.

The story of our culture’s subsequent love affair with the film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s – and not with the novella, which may be admired, and certainly has the cachet of its author, but is hardly well-beloved, much less well-read – is really about our love affair with Audrey Hepburn, the movie star. The persona she consistently projected was of authentic, intrinsic refinement, of chic sophistication that was never brittle or cold, of an instinctive stylishness that reached its epitome in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The moment when Hepburn first emerges in the film still ranks as one of the great screen makeovers of all time.

The title credits roll over a scene of condensed, symbolic wishing: Hollywood as dream factory. Hepburn is standing, very slim, in a long, black column dress with a glittering, enormous collar necklace and the trademark black sunglasses that Jackie O would adopt a few years later. (Jackie O’s supposedly iconic looks markedly resemble Hepburn’s from a few years earlier.) The camera encourages us to gaze longingly with her through the Tiffany’s window at diamonds and other jewels; and then she strolls up the street, munching the doughnut that we know is probably the only doughnut Hepburn ever ate in her life. But it is precisely these little touches of normality, of the ordinary, that humanised Hepburn’s image.

The next time we see her, she is asleep, wearing an absurd eye-mask and dangling ear-plugs with little blue tassels. She groggily awakes and pulls on a man’s tuxedo shirt – one of the film’s few insinuations that she may entertain “gentlemen callers” overnight – and, hair awry, opens the door to George Peppard, playing Capote’s alter ego: straightened, masculinised and elongated (Capote was just 5ft 3in). Paul Varjak – as the film arbitrarily names the writer who will be cast as Holly’s obligatory love interest – is locked out; Holly lets him in and realises that she has an appointment. A frantic rush to get dressed ensues, as Holly hunts for alligator pumps, brushes her teeth, puts on an enormous hat, and emerges from the bedroom as – voilà! – Audrey Hepburn. The camera lingers lovingly on a close-up of her dazzling smile as she asks, half-coyly, half-sweetly: “Surprised?” “Amazed,” responds Varjak – and so are we, the transformation is so quick, so easy, so absolute. Or we would be amazed, if it weren’t for the fact that we were always waiting for it.

One of the things that makes this transformation so effective is its apparent effortlessness. All she needs are the right hat and a little black dress (it was Hepburn who turned the Little Black Dress into the wardrobe staple it remains today) and there she is, like magic, with the wave of a fairy godmother’s wand. From Now, Voyager to Pretty Woman, Hollywood has sold stories that centre on metamorphosis, when ugly ducklings become beautiful swans or streetwalkers become homemakers. The appeal of transformation is the appeal of self-improvement: some women are born beautiful, some have beauty thrust upon them – but Hollywood promises that beauty can be achieved. The romance of Breakfast at Tiffany’s is not really with Peppard (in the only leading role he’ll be remembered for) but with Hepburn herself, with the fantasy of artless sophistication she embodies. Hepburn (again, unlike Monroe) never appeared to try too hard.

Holly Golightly at Tiffany’s Windown in Blake Edwards Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Hepburn’s iconic transfigurations extend back to her first, Oscar-winning, starring role in Roman Holiday in 1953 (the same year, incidentally, of Monroe’s breakthrough role in Niagara). In a kind of inside-out Cinderella story, Hepburn, as Princess Ann, has one perfect day in Rome, riding around on the back of Gregory Peck’s moped, before the clock strikes midnight and she returns to her duties, without Prince Charming, but secure in the knowledge of his love. And part of her metamorphosis comes when she crops her hair, trades a few accessories, including her shoes, rolls up her sleeves, unbuttons her collar, and instantly achieves the insouciant gamine look that would become her trademark.

Hepburn’s next film, Sabrina, featured a more prolonged transformation, again from pony-tailed adolescent into pixie-cropped personification of soignée style. Sabrina added a fairy godfather in the form of a French baron so old that his intentions – and hence her morals – are never in question. Soon after came Funny Face, and another makeover, the first that the story represents as requiring an army of fashionistas and photographers (but only because it takes that many to overcome her character’s resistance to being objectified). Eventually, with My Fair Lady, Hepburn would play the ultimate transformed object in Eliza Doolittle, a woman who is initially not at all the author of her own transformation. When Hepburn started playing the Princess, she stopped being Cinderella – for good. It was almost as if she didn’t have to, because her definitive persona had been fixed. The princess had emerged.

The film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, like Capote’s novella, sees Holly as half-Cinderella, half-Pygmalion – Doc, who saves her, and begins to educate her, however primitively; like a female Huck Finn, lights out for the territories, escaping the confinements of “civilization”.

But Hollywood would never release Hepburn into the wild – not least because she so patently doesn’t belong there. The film also has a romance with New York, which it doesn’t want her to leave. So along comes the final Pygmalion, the writer Paul Varjak, who finishes domesticating Holly. Capote’s Holly is too mobile and erratic for a Hollywood just emerging from the 1950s. She is a vagrant playgirl; her only permanent state, as she prints on her calling cards, is that she is “Miss Holiday Golightly, Travelling”. And it means something very different for a woman to be a tramp than for a man.

This is why, for the story to work as a romance, Holly’s indiscretions need to be cancelled out, as it were, by those of a lover who has also fallen prey to the lure of sexual economics, who has also sold himself. It is not just that Hollywood has to inject a love story wherever it finds a beautiful woman (although that is certainly the case) but that the man must ultimately redeem her, and himself, from a life of sexual opportunism that she describes in euphemistic terms as receiving money “for trips to the powder room”, and he describes as “having a decorator”.

Audrey Hepburn wiht George Peppard

Like Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Breakfast at Tiffany’s is fundamentally a story of the American dream. Capote’s novella, if not about nightmares, is certainly about the costs of the dream. The film – like most Hollywood movies – is determined to view dreams as wish-fulfilment. And by no coincidence it took a European movie star with aristocratic heritage to bring the American dream to life in all its sentimental romance, because the American dream is, in part, a dream about being the real thing, about belonging. Like Holly Golightly and Monroe, Jay Gatsby is a real phony. But Hepburn was a dream of authenticity rather than imitation, of success rather than failure, of security rather than escape.

You can call it sentimental, even cheap and manipulative. Capote certainly did, and many critics followed suit: an early review declared that Hepburn was “viciously, pathologically miscast” as Holly. This is undeniable – but it is also why the film works on its own terms, and has become so culturally distinct from the novella. Despite how much of the story and even of Capote’s dialogue it keeps, it is a fundamentally different tale because its tone and mood is so at odds with Capote’s. The film is, in a word, sunny; it is full of hope. The novella is full of shadows and terrors.

Found Cat in the rain near where holly let him out of the car

In the end, though, shadows are no truer than sunlight. Edwards’s film is unquestionably escapist, and it eagerly encourages us not to think about how sordid and sad its characters and story actually are. That’s what romance is. And in fact Capote’s novella is rife with its own sentimentalities, in love with a romantic notion of loss and escape. Capote’s Holly is essentially a variation on the hooker with a heart of gold, and the novella is dominated by a kind of willed cynicism, a veneer of sophisticated experience belied by the ending, in which the narrator sighs over his unconvincing hope that this “wild thing” has at last found a home. The film Breakfast at Tiffany’s is dominated by a willed innocence, a romance with romance itself. But in fact the innocence of Capote’s Holly is willed, too – which is what Hollywood gets right. As she tells the narrator in the novella: “I haven’t anything against whores. Except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts. I mean, you can’t bang the guy and cash his checks and at least not try to love him.” The morality lies in the effort to have an honest heart, genuinely to feel the emotion: and the film shares this moral code. Hollywood has always pandered to us, selling a vast, vulgar and alluring but false beauty. The makers of the film are, metaphorically speaking, banging Holly; they’re exploiting her story, selling her out, maybe even corrupting her – but they are also trying very hard to love her, and they want us to love her, too.

Inky Cherie — Moon River — Composed by Henri Mancini for Breakfast at Tiffany’sA very delicate rendition of Moon River. A Beautiful voice with very little accompaniment.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s Trailer

Audrey Hepburn – Moon River

Andy Williams — Moon River — Clips from Film

Breakfast at Tiffany’s: Paul says “I love you” – Library Scene

Documentary on Breakfast at Tiffany’s Movie – Blake Edwards & others discuss the film

Kittens On the Way via LSD
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
Poster from Butterflies Oftime
Post Created Monday 9th September 2013
Posted On Monday 9th September 2012
REMEMBERING MEMORIES

Dedicated to our new kittens on the way from Lorca [LSD] Suzuki Darwin.

She is our newest refuge mum kitty to wander to our doorstep looking for sustenance. Did she ask for a home? She wasn’t that pushy but she needed one. She was starving and later to be discovered to be just petite. The vet, after ultra-sound, heard at least two kitten heartbeats. She was assuredly quite pregnant.

Does this mean a new mother kitty at our door next year?

Gatsby showed up last year in early April 2012. She was thrown over a chain-linked fence. Same results, petite and definitely pregnant. She gave us Carter, Poe and Parker. Unfortunately, she died suddenly of FIP. We had her for just over a year and a few months. She gave us her darlings to care for the rest of their lives. I love all three, but don’t let the other two know, I am addicted to Carter. He is the one in this photograph.

carter the lion sweetest kitten on the planet and the universe

Still deciding how many if more than one will Shawn & I keep. I have a promise of one if she/he is a longed haired Black & White kitten. She/he has a name already. It is “Beane Sprout” after a kitten we found and who died from Leukemia a year later. A very sad and long moment in time. We even tried blood transfusions, which gave us two more weeks with her. I was so not in reality thinking that would help her survive. She was our baby. We would have tried anything, as long as it didn’t hurt her. Sprout was a prize baby.

This little one is very close to sprout. a touch more white and you would see what is inside my heart and mind. i could love this kitty just as much. so much like sprout. adorable and huggable.

Someone actually threw her into a dumpster in our ally when we lived in an apartment. It was winter and cold. Friends were over. I kept hearing strange sounds coming from outside. Couldn’t figure it out. Someone braved the weather and went on a search. In they came with a soaking wet small kitten. I turn into mother immediately. Gave orders as kindly as I could for dry towels, an opened can of cat food.

After drying her up, I bundled her up and put the open can of yummy cat food in front of her face. She was starving. She inhaled as much as she could and eventually fell asleep in my arms.

She slipped away from this world the same way she entered it, being rocked in my arms and snuggled. Shawn and I talked quietly to her. We tried the vet. All he could say is that he could do nothing, that we should just let her die. He made me so furious. I didn’t want to lose her. I loved her so much. She loved us so much.

She was my shadow. I still miss her so much it makes me cry to think of her. It is why I pray and it is so important that Lorca bring her back to me in this new family she is going to bring into our lives. Written by Jennifer Kiley

I’d make this deal with any kitten, any day.

[See poster below for the deal]

Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor — Zurriuss

Fav Top Ten Films #3: Marnie
Post Create by Jk the secret keeper
Film Review Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
Post Created On Tuesday 17th September 2013
Posted on Friday 20th September 2013
FILM FRIDAY

Marnie (1964) A+
Director Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Jennifer Kiley

“Marnie” is released to the public following  “The Birds,”  which was preceded by “Psycho.” At the time “Marnie” was not a financial success at the box office but has become a cult film, which this writer has seen in the triple digits since I was a kid, and felt a strong connection to the film. I may have been too young to grasp all the subtleties but it enthralled me.

It is like watching a car accident for some people, I have never been able to look away. Whenever I find it is on television these days, I pull out my own DVD, unless it is on an ad free channel, and settle in to watch it again. There just is something about “Marnie.” It is addicting and compelling. To watch a young woman go through so much turmoil and the people she meets all seem to be out to try and take something away from her.

In the first scene, Margaret Edgar,  alias Marnie is introduced as she’s walking on the platform of a train station. The film’s protagonist, played by Tippi Hedren of “The Birds” fame, is constantly changing her appearance away from her natural blonde, to a disguise of varying hair colours, in order for her to take on new identities.

She moves from job to job, always as someone different. Now, there is a reason she does all these makeovers. Simply put, she is a kleptomaniac. She gets hired into job where the bosses are thrown by her beauty and hire, more times than not, without any references. The dirty old men that they are, get what they deserve.  She rips them off of lots of money from there supposedly secure safes.

One of these times, Mark Rutland happens to be visiting her employer and cannot help but notice her beauty and her strange tick. She pulls down her skirt just a shade, to give the appearance of being modest, when in actuality it is to lure in her victims or to unconsciously exhibit her dislike of any man looking at her in a sexual manner.We learn that she’s a thief, an unstable woman who moves from job to job, changing names, physical appearance, and wardrobe.

She is hired as a secretary by Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), He, of course immediately after he observes her pulling down the hem of her skirt. Unfazed, she steals money from his company’s safe and then disappears.

Mark, however, is smarter than she thinks he is, and upon discovery of the theft, he searches for her and finds her. At this point, Mark announces his intent to marry her, instead of reporting her to the police. Marnie has no alternative but to comply.

Mark slowly becomes aware of Marnie’s problems, including her kleptomania and her being emotionally fragile. Eventually, he realizes she had a troubled childhood and this is the cause of her problems.

Mark is sincere in wanting to help Marnie. Trying to give her a sense of hope but instead, in the beginning he causes her more pain than comfort. There is an element of a Freudian psychological condition growing within her, which needs examining and exposure, in order for her to regain any sense of balance in her life.

Mark wants to play the psychiatrist who helps her. In one scene when Marnie is having a nightmare, Lil gets to her first, but Mark quickly dismisses Lil away. He attempts to question Marnie. They end up playing free association, at Marnie’s suggestion. She says to Mark, “I bet you can’t wait to play psychiatrist.”

That’s how the game begins, as a challenge. Marnie felt she would push Mark away if she played along with his attempts to help. If she succeeded, she thought he would just leave her alone. It backfires on Marnie. It starts out simple, but the words Mark starts slowly to trick Marnie. He gradually builds up the speed of firing the words at her until he gets to “red.”

What happens when Marnie hears this word, you need to see the film to watch how this develops and what happens when Marnie is made to confront the word “red.”

Throughout the film, the colour “red” is significant, and Mark is trying to figure out what is its significance. He does want to help her but he has his own nature with which to contend.  Mark keeps trying until he eventually gets a lead in which he feels could resolve Marnie’s nightmares.

Mark is gentle with Marnie, once he establishes with her, he is in control. Not to destroy her, but to help her regain a sense of well-being. He realizes she has many sensitivities, one of which is her loathing the touch of a man, any man, including him. He is patient and tries to be loving, tender and understanding. But >he is  motivated by intense feeling of desire. Marnie is beautiful and desirable.

Near the end of the film, a mutual expression of love grows into a feeling of hope. He takes Marnie to see her mother. But before he does this he explains to her, they will work out somehow the thefts she committed. With some understanding and explaining and offering up the amount of money she stole, Mark feels people will be understanding when they discover just what Marnie went through when she was young.

Eventually, his lust and patience collide. The gentleman loses the battle with sensitivity. He is no longer, in a moment of temptation, able to hold back his urges. His need to have his wife, Marnie, overcomes his control to be reserved and understanding. He is overcome by a powerful urge to possess what he desires. In the following obvious statement, “I’ve really trapped a wild thing this time,” demonstrates some of his need to dominate and to control her completely.

Mark and Marnie show up at her mother’s place. After they literally push their way into the house, past Marnie’s mom, a lightning storm explodes. Marnie begins to react with fear. Her mom, Bernice wants them to leave. When Marnie tries to seek comfort from her mother at any time, Bernice cannot handle the closeness and rejects her daughter repeatedly, always saying the same phrase: “Marnie, honey, you’re achin’ my leg.” It’s when Marnie rests her head in her lap, she is always rejected. A relationship so tenuous and confusing. Marnie never understands why her mother always pushes her away.

In the final moments of the film, a great deal is explained by the scenes which show exactly why Marnie developed into the person she has become. Now you know I am not going to tell what happens in this review. It is a must see film and the ending is a real killer.The last frames of the film show Mark and Marnie driving away, heading toward the docks, there appears a ship in the harbour. There are sea gulls flying about and children are playing jump rope while singing a song.The dock is obviously a mat but the film was made a long time ago and it does give the odd impression you are on a stage. As though the reality is all a dream. As the effect of the revealing sequence appears to be a dream.To explain the colour “red,” it is left to the observer to put the pieces together. What does “red” symbolize to most people? Is it a fusion of sex, violence, and death? Is this the overriding emotional struggle throughout the film? These questions can only be answered by watching this visually enhancing film, with tension continually building until its conclusion, where all is revealed in a most dramatic and disturbing finale.

Cast

Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren)
Mark Ruthland (Sean Connery)
Lil Mainwaring (Diane Baker)
Sidney Strutt (Martin Gabel)
Bernice Edgar (Louise Latham)
Cousin Bob (Bob Sweeney)
Man at the Track (Milton Selzer)
Mr. Ruthland (Alan Napier)
First Detective (Henry Beckman)
Rita (Edith Evanson)

Crew

Produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Jay Presson Allen
Based on the novel by Winston Graham
Camera: Robert Burks
Editor: George Tomasini
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Production design: Robert Boyle
Costumes: Edith Head

Marnie Trailer — Hitchcock — Tippi Hedren — Sean Connery

The Fifth Element
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Post Created on Monday 30th September 2013
Posted On Friday 4th October 2013
FILM FRIDAY

Benedict Cumberbatch shines as Julian Assange in Bill Condon’s over-ambitious take on WikiLeaks, which opens this year’s Toronto film festival.

Catherine Shoard
The Guardian
Friday 6th September 2013

For an employee of the Guardian, particularly one with jetlag, Bill Condon’s WikiLeaks thriller can seem more hallucination than movie. An account of the ascent of Julian Assange and his collaboration with this newspaper (among others) in the publication of classified documents, it plays like one of those dreams in which your office looks normal enough from the outside, but step within and everything’s subtly different. It’s more Scandinavian, somehow; with car park pillars and glass walls to which people attach crucial bits of paper, as on Crimewatch. The editor has developed a sudden taste for shagpile rugs. And why did you never notice the deputy is a dead spit for the dishy one on Downton Abbey?

The Fifth Estate
Production year: 2013
Directors: Bill Condon
Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Bruhl, Laura Linney, Peter Capaldi

Such tweaks will not get an artistic license revoked. In fact, in adapting both a book on the affair by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding, as well as tech activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s account of working for Assange, The Fifth Estate is a project in whose sources one can place considerable faith. Certainly, Condon does. At times it can feel he’s risked coherence for chronology, giving us his own surfeit of data without offering sufficient kit with which we can sift it.

The plot tracks Assange from the time he recruited Domscheit-Berg, through early online celebrity, before his meeting with Guardian investigative reporter Nick Davies (David Thewlis), who, in consultation with editor Alan Rusbridger (Peter Capaldi) and deputy Ian Katz (Dan Stevens), began working with Assange towards a coordinated launch of hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables and war reports. The timeline bumps a bit, but still pushes forward confidently, with our hacker heroes forever arriving in a new city, before some fresh turn of events requires them to slam shut their laptops and rush off again.

The template is David Fincher’s The Social Network, which took the creation of Facebook and turned it into the character study of a neurotic loner with the world at his fingertips. Both films go big with the swishy visuals, this one deploying a bombardment of text and newsreel to suggest the morass of info, plus flight map-style graphics illustrating its flood across the globe. Both films are eager to show that computing is an arena for creative genius, with much clacking on laptops like Steinways. Both also suffer from the problem that watching someone type isn’t, after a while, that exciting. Condon further ups the dramatic ante with Lynchian visualisations of Domscheit-Berg’s inner life, plus a lot of techno.

And both films choose as their key arc the relationship between men most closely associated with the site’s inception. But while The Social Network kept the focus on the anti-hero, relegating Eduardo Saverin’s role to support, this one bumps up the best friend to a lead, overestimating our interest in Domscheit-Berg’s lovelife. Not that the film is really that interested either. At heart, The Fifth Estate is a good, old-fashioned bromance – Assange even gets to meet the parents (spoiler: it doesn’t go well).

As for Cumberbatch, he’s both the asset and the slight undoing; so magnetic as to render hopes of a two-hander redundant. It’s a virtuoso impersonation, from the deep drawl to louche geek twitches. Suited, he could pass for Nick Cave after a night or two in the fridge. Mostly, though, this Assange is as extraterrestrial as Cumberbatch’s Khan in last year’s Star Trek, a lip-smacking vampire typing through the night. From a distance, he looks like a lizardy angel, courageously saving the world; close up he squints and snuffles like a bleached, greasy mouse.

Introducing the film last night, Condon said he wanted to explore the limits of truth-telling: when was a lie too important not to expose, and when was it so crucial you must not dream of doing so? In that, he has succeeded admirably: this is highly competent catnip for the watercooler crowd. Toronto has prepared itself well for the forthcoming week with a hot potato. Now roll on the cheese.

The Fifth Estate [Official Trailer]

Happy Birthday, John Lennon 9th October
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Remembered by Jennifer Kiley, Jk the secret keeper, j. kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
Post Created on Thursday 10th October 2013
Posted On Wednesday 9th October 2013
JOHN LENNON’S BIRTHDAY

Remember Memories

This is strictly music, posters, images, an interview
of John & Yoko with Dick Cavett [great!!!], quotations.
Enjoy. Happy Birthday John, 10/09/13, Love Jennifer

Tiger orchid #14 Robert Mapplethorp

Tiger orchid #14 Robert Mapplethorp

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”
― John Lennon

Beatles–In My Life

John Lennon — Stand By Me

“Sometimes it’s not enough to know what things mean,
sometimes you have to know what things don’t mean.” ― Bob Dylan

John Lennon — Woman

John Lennon — Mind Games

To “River”
I Dedicate This Song to My New Little Boy “River.”
He is 3 weeks old & a Dark Grey Tabby Kitten.
Born on the 19th September 2013 shortly before Midnight.

John Lennon — Beautiful Boy

John Lennon on Dick Cavett [entire show] September 11, 1971 [HD]

I Include This Photo in My Tribute to John
Lennon & Dedicate It to Julie with Love. Jk

John Lennon-Imagine

fire works by matt the samurai.gif

John Lennon — Watching the Wheels

Blended Nature by Alex Fitch

John Lennon — Give Peace A Chance

John Lennon — Power To the People

blue fantasy —anonymous

John Lennon — Starting Over

John Lennon — Jealous Guy

surreal green planet under water by rolan gonzalez

The Beatles — And I Love Her

The Beatles — If I Fell

The Beatles — Michelle

the anatomy of a cover – cover – artist masloski carmen

The Beatles — You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away

Quite Busy — abstract digital art

critical thinker by j. kiley

The Beatles — Norwegian Wood

abstract purple digital art by j. kiley © jennifer kiley 2013

life from death created by j. kiley

created by j. kiley (c) jennifer kiley 2013

The Beatles — Hey, Jude

abiotic by yani ioannou

shattered time – unknown artist

The Beatles — The Long and Winding Road

silver ball by sl8r.co

created by j. kiley (c) jennifer kiley 2013

The Beatles — Across the Universe

snowing by pinstriped briefs

created by j. kiley (c) jennifer kiley 2013

The Beatles — Let It Be

The Beatles — While My Guitar Gentle Weeps

candle-flame-gif

les bougies qui dirigent les jeunes voyageurs d’âme

John Lennon Peace Shine On

John Lennon
Oct.9th, 19
Dec. 8th, 19

The Beatles — Strawberry Fields

living inside of bubbles with flowers they burst and reality touches your soul

bubbling darkness gif

John Lennon — Oh, Yoko

trees and night sky fireflies and polka-tumblr

The Beatles — All You Need Is Love

The Beatles — Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds

John Lennon — Mother

Below Is the Surrogate Mother
I Always Dreamed I Would Find Someday

The Beatles — When I’m 64?

John Lennon — Oh, My Love

a friendly little one just exercising fire breathing

Fav Top Ten Film #1: The Sound of Music
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Review Written by Jennifer Kiley
Post Created Sunday 6th October 2013
Posted On Friday 11th October 2013
FILM FRIDAY

“The Sound of Music” is my favorite movie of all time. It has major sentimental meaning to me. Rather then my reviewing it. I would like to share the images and video tapes from the film. The photos are in order as they appear in the film. I believe in my extensive search, I found almost all the shots I could find, which fit almost every scene in the movie with a few exceptions. Don’t want to give it all away for those who haven’t seen it.

I do recommend if you are planning on renting or streaming “The Sound of Music” you may want to reconsider viewing this post until later but then, the images are so delightful, you may not want to put it off. I do realize a great many people have seen this film and are just as invested in it as I am. It is great for everyone. I am an avid Julie Andrews fan and will never get enough of her film roles and her singing. I find when she is singing for a role her voice lent a certain depth to it.

I plan on using some assorted dialogue and descriptions of what is occurring. I worked on putting this together in reverse. With all the shots and videos collected, I placed the last photos first and fit in the videos where I felt they best fit. As I said, this is my favorite film of all time so I do know it frontwards and backwards. And I am testing myself by writing this review from the memory of all the times I viewed it. Let’s see how accurate I can get. After I am finished, I will then watch the film and see how I did.

That means I am pulling out all the dialogue from inside my head and testing my memory from the plus 100 times I have seen this film. You would think I would be bored from seeing something that many times. Absolutely not. This film was the savior of my childhood. It was one of my escapes. I went to everything theatre I could find where it was showing. When I was a kid films stayed forever in one place. It grossed more money in its day in ticket sales and if compared to todays prices I believe it is second or third place in sales for all times. Keep in mind, there weren’t as many people born back in 1964. It just kept drawing people into the theatres. I saw it in my home state and I saw it in New York City.

Once it hit television, I watched it every year, until the VCR and Video Tapes. It probably was the first film I purchased on Video and on DVD. I have purchased different versions of it as the technology has improved. Next is to, hopefully, receive a present of it in Blu-Ray over the Holidays or as an unholiday, unbirthday present. We’ll see. Hint! Hint! Hint!

So lets begin the tale as the opening of the film is the cameras sweeping over the mountains of Austria, into the valleys, hearing birds and wind, until we come on the scene where Maria, our heroine, is dancing and singing on the hilltops, twirling about so carelessly. She is a postulate at the Abby near by and not terribly successful at it.

In this scene, Julie keeps getting flattened by the helicopters, so Robert Wise, the director, has to do take after take. Julie loves sharing this story in many of her interviews.

The Sound of Music

Review by Jennifer Kiley

“How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” A great song. It describes Maria to a perfect degree as you will see in the animated image of her arrival back to the Abby after singing in the hills.

Maria & Reverend Mother visit privately in the Reverend Mother’s private office.

Maria: Which brings me to another transgression Reverend Mother. I was singing out there today without permission.

Reverend Mother: Maria, it is only here in the Abbey that we have rules about postulate singing.

Maria: I can’t seem to stop singing wherever I am. And what’s worse, I can’t keep to stop saying things . . . everything and anything I think and feel.

Reverend Mother: Some people would call that honesty.

Maria: Oh, but it’s terrible Reverend Mother. You know how Sister Berthe always makes me kiss the floor after we’ve had a disagreement? Well, lately I’ve taken to kissing the floor when I see her coming . . . just to save time.

Outside the Abby, Maria looks around as she leaves.

Maria: Where God closes a door, somewhere else he opens a window.

On the way to the von Trapp home, Maria sings the song “I Have Confidence,” the build up her courage. After all, she is about to face a daunting fate. A governess for seven children and ones who don’t like governesses.

After the Captain uses his whistle to show Maria what their individual whistle call sounds like, he proceeds to show Maria her whistle sound.

Captain: Now, when I want you, this is what you will hear.

[blows whistle]

Maria: Oh, no, sir. I’m sorry, sir. I could never answer to a whistle. Whistles are for dogs and cats and other animals, but not for children and definitely not for me. It would be too… humiliating.

Captain von Trapp: Fraulein, were you this much trouble at the Abbey?

Maria: Oh, much more, sir.

Captain von Trapp: Hmm.

[starts walking away. Maria blows her whistle & he turns around]

Maria: Excuse me, sir. I don’t know your signal

Maria: Whistles are for dogs and cats but not for children and especially not for me.

Maria asks the children to once again tell her their names and something about themselves. Louisa tries to trick her but she is way to smart. She re-identifies Brigitta and Louisa.

Brigitta: You’re smart. My names Brigitta and I think that is the ugliest dress I’ve ever seen.

The children debate the question but mischief is afoot. Maria makes a huge mistake.

Maria: I’ve never been a governess before. You’ll have to teach me.

The children proceed to tell her all the wrong things to do. She is just a governess and they don’t want one. SO they treat Maria equally as bad as the other governesses.

Maria: Poor children.

In less than a moment she is throwing into the air as gently as possible a frog she found in her pocket.

Frau Schmidt: With the last governess it was [snakes or spiders].

After Fraulein Maria sits down in her second attempt, she speaks.

Maria: I’d like to thank you all for the precious gift you left in my pocket today.

Captain: What gift?

Maria: It’s meant to be a secret between the children and me.

Captain: Then I suggest you keep it, and let us eat.

Maria: Knowing how nervous I must have been, a stranger in a new household, knowing how important it was for me to feel accepted, it was so kind and thoughtful of you to make my first moments here so warm and happy and pleasant.

A bit of weeping breaks out amongst the children.

Captain von Trapp: Fraulein, is it to be at every meal, or merely at dinnertime, that you intend on leading us all through this rare and wonderful new world of… indigestion?

Maria: Oh, there just happy Captain. [The children break out into a full out cry, feeling badly about the tricks they have played on her.] When she was just trying to get them to like her.

A secret rendezvous in the gazebo between Liesl and Rolf. He delivers telegrams at certain times in hopes of seeing her.

A thunderstorm has struck and the sound of thunder is scary for all the kids. Maria sings a song about “My Favorite Things” to try and comfort them.

Captain enters Maria’s bedroom to find out what is making all the racket.

Captain: Fraulein Maria, did I or did I not say that bedtime is to be strictly observed in this household?

Maria: Yes, well the children were scared of the thunderstorm and… You did, sir.

Captain: And do you or do you not have trouble following these simple instructions?

Maria: Only during thunderstorms, sir.

The Captain reminds her he is leaving in the morning to visit the Baroness. Maria asks him for some material to make play clothes for the children. His answer was a no, they have their uniforms. But we all can sense how resourceful Maria will be.

Maria, while they are on outing, begins to teach the children how to sing. Another one of the many things that have been neglected to bring joy into their lives.

Rolfe gets nervous when he is caught throwing stones at Liesl’s window. The Captain reprimands him after he raises his arm in a Nazi salute of Heil. The Captain grabs the telegram. All is hell is about to be breaking loose in Austria. The Captain’s home. He yells at Max for his careless comment about not caring. His mind starts to drift off into the prospect of his Austria disappearing. Suddenly the sound of laughter and singing coming from the water just across the lawn from where they are on the patio.

Maria: Children can’t do all the things they’re supposed to if they have to worry about spoiling their precious clothes.

Captain: They haven’t complained yet.

Maria: Well, they wouldn’t dare! They love you too much. They *fear* you too much!

Captain: I don’t wish you to discuss my children in this manner.

Maria: Well, you’ve got to hear from someone! You’re never home long enough to know them.

Captain: I said I don’t want to hear anymore from you about my children!

Maria: I know you don’t, but you’ve got to! Now, take Liesl.

Captain: [hesitatingly] You will not say one word about Liesl, Fraulein.

Maria: She’s not a child anymore, and one of these days, you’re going to wake up and find that she’s a woman. You won’t even know her. And Friedrich, he’s a boy, but he wants to be a man and there’s no one to show him how.

Captain: Don’t you dare tell me about my son.

Maria: Brigitta could tell you about him if you let her get close to you. She notices everything.

Captain: Fraulein…

Maria: And Kurt pretends he’s tough not to show how hurt he is when you brush him aside,

Captain: That will do!

Maria: the way you do all of them. Louisa I don’t even know about yet,

Captain: I said that will do!

Maria: but somebody has to find out about her, and the little ones just want to be loved. Oh, please, Captain, love them! Love them all!

Captain: I don’t care to hear anything further from you about my children.

Maria: I am not finished yet!

Captain: Oh, yes, you are, Captain!

[pauses]

Captain: Fraulein.

——-

Captain: Now, Fraulein. I want a truthful answer from you.

Maria: Yes, Captain?

Captain: Is it possible – or could I have just imagined it – have my children by any chance been climbing trees today?

Maria: Yes, Captain.

Captain: I see. And where, may I ask, did they get these… ummm…

Maria: Play clothes.

Captain: Oh, is that what you call them?

Maria: I made them. From the drapes that used to hang in my bedroom.

Captain: Drapes?

Maria: They still have plenty of wear left. The children have been everywhere in them.

Captain: Do you mean to tell me that my children have been roaming about Salzburg dressed up in nothing but some old drapes?

Maria: Mmm-hmmm. And having a marvelous time!

——-

[singing starts somewhere inside]

Captain: What’s that?

Maria: It’s singing.

Captain: Yes, I realize it’s singing, but who?

Maria: The children.

Captain: The children?

Maria: I taught them something to sing for the Baroness.

When the Captain enters the house, he finds them in the sitting room standing opposite the seated Baroness and Max. They are singing a rendition of the song “The Sound of Music.” He eventually joins in. When all is finished, the littlest through Maria’s directions from the doorway, to give a handful of flower to the Baroness. Meanwhile the Captain is hugging all his children. He spies Maria at the door way and excuses himself.

Captain: [after apologizing] I want you to stay. I ask you to stay.

It’s a tear in the eye, lump in your throat type moment.

After the show, the children ask their father to sing. He declines but all are insistent, especially, Max. He is a talent agent of sorts.

Max: Just say the word Georg, we will make you the Von Trapp Family Singers, with you are the head.

They are all finally able to convince Georg to sing. Maria presents him with the guitar.

Edelweiss is the song of choice. It is so beautifully done. It is when Georg and Maria really gaze into each others eyes. It is one of those intense moments for me where my heart pounds and my breathing stops.

The Sound of Music — Whistles & Meeting the Children

Christopher Plummer — Edelweiss [Variety of Scenes from film --- The Sound of Music]

Liesl eventually joins in singing with her father.

Time for a party. Everyone who is anyone, even those who Georg would never invite were invited. The children convince Maria to teach them to dance. The Captain joins them by interrupting Kurt and takes Maria’s hand and they dance to the Laendler. It is an Austria folk dance. The Captain and Maria do it so well. Another romantic moment in the movie.

After the children say goodnight in a song, Max gets Georg to invite Maria to join them all for dinner. He tells her they will wait until she changes. The Baroness shows up in her room. This is when she frightens the hell out of Maria by telling her that she is in love with the Captain and he thinks he is in love with Maria.

Maria starts to pack. Baroness leaves.

Moments later we see Maria placing a note over the mantle and making a quiet exit out the front door.

Later in the story, Maria returns to the Abbey to seek the Reverend Mother’s advice:

Maria: Reverend mother.

Reverend Mother: Why did they send you back to us?

Maria: They didn’t send me back . . . I left.

Reverend Mother: Tell me what happened.

Maria: Well, I . . . I was frightened.

Reverend Mother: Frightened? Were they unkind to you?

Maria: Oh, no, I, I was . . . I was confused. I felt . . . I’ve never felt that way before. I couldn’t stay, I knew here I’d be away from it. I’d be . . . safe.

Reverend Mother: (Instructively) Maria. Our Abbey is not to be used as an escape. What is it you can’t face?

Maria: I can’t face him again.

Reverend Mother: Him? Captain Von Trapp?

Maria nods affirmatively.

Reverend Mother: Are you in love with him?

Maria: I don’t know! I don’t know! The Baroness said I was. She said that he was in love with me, but I . . . I didn’t want to believe it. Oh, there were times when we would look at each other. Oh mother, I could hardly breathe.

Reverend Mother: Did you let him see how you felt?

Maria: If I did, I didn’t know it. That’s what’s been torturing me. I was there on God’s errand. To have asked for his love would have been wrong. Oh, I couldn’t stay, I just couldn’t . . . I’m ready at this moment to take my vows. Please help me.

Reverend Mother: Maria, the love of a man and a woman is holy too. You have a great capacity to love. What you must find out is how God wants you to spend your love.

Maria: But I pledged my life to God. I pledged my life to His service.

Reverend Mother: My daughter, if you love this man, it doesn’t mean you love God less. No. You must find out. You must go back.

Maria: Oh mother, you can’t ask me to do that. Please let me stay. I beg of you-

Reverend Mother: Maria, these walls were not built to shut out problems. You have to face them. You have to live the life you were born to live.

Climb Every Mountain — Maria with Mother Superior

My Favorite Things — The Children Singing & Maria Returns

The children grab Maria’s things. There father sends the children in to dinner. After they leave Maria speaks to the Captain and the Baroness.

Maria: The children tell me you are to be married.

Captain confirms it. He asks her if she plans to stay now that she is back.

Maria: The reason I returned no longer exists. So, only until you can find another governess.

Maria walks past them to go inside.

Georg is on the back balcony overlooking the water when he sees Maria in her blue dress walking down by the water and then begins to walk off toward the gazebo. Before she is out of sight, the Baroness joins Georg. She is not blind. Georg is about to tell her something, which she takes the lead on. She tells him she needs to leave.

Baroness: Somewhere out there is a lady who I think will never be a nun. Auf Wiedersehen, darling.

She takes her leave.

Captain: Maria, there isn’t going to be any Baroness anymore.

Maria: I don’t understand.

Captain: Well, we called off our engagement, you see, and…

Maria: Oh, I’m sorry.

Captain: Yes. You are?

Maria: Mm-hmm. You did?

Captain: Yes. Well, you can’t marry someone when you’re in love with someone else… can you?

Georg and Maria talk. She begins to tell him what the Reverend Mother always says. Maria sings the song “Something Good,” while Georg is holding her. When she is finished they kiss and hug.

Captain: Maria, is there anyone I should ask for your hand in marriage.

Barely getting the words out.

Maria and the Captain: We should ask the children.

The Sound of Music Trailer — New Version

Max fills the Captain and Maria of the telegram and with the children about the Salzburg Folk Festival. The children are entered as the Von Trapp Family Singers. Georg gets angry with Max but doesn’t want to spoil their return. After reading the telegram, he tells Maria to get the children ready. They must all leave Austria. The Nazis want Georg to head up Captaining a ship in the Navy of the Third Reich. That is unthinkable to Georg.

Marta: Why doesn’t father turn the motor on?

Kurt: [agitated] Because he doesn’t want anybody to hear us!

Captain: Shh!

Louisa: What will Frau Schmidt and Franz said when they discover we’re gone?

Captain: They’ll be able to answer truthfully they didn’t know anything about it if anyone asks them.

Louisa: Will we be coming back here?

Captain: Someday, Liesl. I do hope someday.

Gretl: Are Father and Uncle Max going to push the car all the way to Switzerland?

Maria: Shh!

As they push the car as silently as possible through the front gate, after closing the gate and before they can get in the car, the Nazis headed by Heir Geller turn their car lights to shine on the Von Trapp Family in their traveling cloths.

Herr Geller, the Captain, Max and Maria get into a debate. The Von Trapp’s come up with the idea that they are on the way to the folk festival. Maria tells him that the night air is not good for the children’s voices. Herr Geller is magnanimous and offers to follow them to the festival and from their they will take Captain von Trapp to accept his commission in the Navy of the Third Reich.

Before Georg starts to sing “Edelweiss” he tells the audience that the Third Reich are waiting for him to finish so they can take him to his command for the Navy of the Third Reich. There is a buzz amongst the audience, sounds of being very disturbed by this news.

While Georg is singing, he breaks down. Maria comes to his side and begins to sing. Eventually, she motions for the children to join them, then the whole audience is motioned by Georg to join in. Chills go up your spine during this song.

Max is the MC of the show. He tells the audience before the awards are given out the Von Trapp’s are going to do an encore while the judges make their decisions.

The von Trapp’s, when it is announced they have won. They are called to the stage several times, until a Nazi soldier comes running in.

Nazi soldier: There gone. The von Trapp’s are gone.

All the Nazis scramble to get out of the Festival and to begin the search for the Von Trapp’s. It takes them to the Abby. They search but cannot find them. Rolfe is amongst the Nazis who are searching.

He eventually finds them and hesitates briefly to call them out. But being the misguided *bleep* he is, of course, he can’t be challenged by the Captain who embarrassed him earlier in the film and was trying to do so again.

From here, some funny things occur. The Captain had been given the keys for the Abby’s caretaker’s car. They drive off. You would think the Nazis would be in hot pursuit.

This is where I will end the tale. Pictures say a thousand words. So this is equivalent to a short novella based on a True Story with some exaggerations to make it playable in Broadway Musical form originally, and then an adaptation to the screen from the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein collaboration. I feel it was their best ever.

Watch the Trailer for the Film, followed by some closing shots. After that the cast. And way on the bottom a spoof on actual footage from the film but made to look and sound like a Horror film. It really isn’t scary but instead rather amusing.

So, I hope you enjoyed and made it through this journey with me. And if you haven’t seen “The Sound of Music” or want to see it again, I highly recommend both of these. I’m going to do it myself for the “unknown” amount of times.

Thank you, Jennifer Kiley

The Sound of Music Trailer

CAST:

Julie Andrews ……….. Maria
Christopher Plummer ….. Captain Von Trapp
Eleanor Parker ………. The Baroness
Richard Haydn ……….. Max Detweiler
Peggy Wood ………….. Mother Abbess

CHILDREN:
Charmian Carr ……….. Liesl
Heather Menzies-Urich … Louisa (as Heather Menzies)
Nicholas Hammond …….. Friedrich
Duane Chase …………. Kurt
Angela Cartwright ……. Brigitta
Debbie Turner ……….. Marta
Kym Karath ………….. Gretl

REMAINING CAST:
Anna Lee ……………. Sister Margaretta
Portia Nelson ……….. Sister Berthe
Ben Wright ………….. Herr Zeller
Daniel Truhitte ……… Rolfe
Norma Varden ………… Frau Schmidt
Gilchrist Stuart …….. Franz (as Gil Stuart)
Marni Nixon …………. Sister Sophia

THE VIDEO BELOW IS MEANT TO BE A JOKE ALL IN FUN — DO NOT BE AFRAID TO WATCH IT!!!

The Sound of Music [HORROR TRAILER]

Benedict Cumberbatch: [The Fifth Estate] Answers Assange
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Illustrated by j. kiley
Post Created on Saturday 12th October 2013
Posted On Saturday 12th October 2013
SPECIAL EDITION

Benedict Cumberbatch: [The Fifth Estate] Answers Assange’s Open Letter

Benedict Cumberbatch participated in a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Friday in support of his new film, “The Fifth Estate,” and he was asked about Julian Assange’s open letter to the actor. In a missive dated Jan. 15, 2013, Assange admonished Cumberbatch for participating in the new film, which tracks the rise of WikiLeaks.

“I believe that you should reconsider your involvement in this enterprise,” Assange wrote, before then adding that he wouldn’t meet with Cumberbatch, a request the 37-year-old actor made before the film’s production began. “By meeting with you, I would validate this wretched film, and endorse the talented, but debauched, performance that the script will force you to give.”

Cumberbatch said the letter did give him pause, but also emboldened him into taking the role. His detailed response is below:

He accuses me of being a ‘hired gun’ as if I am an easily bought cypher for right wing propaganda. Not only do I NOT operate in a moral vacuum but this was not a pay day for me at all. I’ve worked far less hard for more financial reward.

This project was important to me because of the integrity I wanted to bring to provocative difficult but ultimately timely and a truly important figure of our modern times. The idea of making a movie about someone who so far removed from my likeness or situation who brought about an ideal through personal sacrifice that has changed the way we view both social media, the power of the individual to have a voice in that space, and be able to question both the hypocrisies and wrongdoings of organizations and bodies of powerful people that rule our lives. …

This resonated deeply with my beliefs in civil liberty, a healthy democracy, and the human rights of both communities and individuals to question those in authority.

I believe that the film, quite clearly, illuminates the great successes of wikileaks and its extraordinary founder Julians Assange. As well as, examining the personalities involved and what became a dysfunctional relationship within that organization. While the legacy of his actions and the organizations continue to evolve and only history will be the true judge of where this is leading us.

‘The Fifth Estate’ is a powerful, if dramatized, entry point for a discussion about this extraordinary lurch forward in our society. I wanted to create a three dimensional portrait of a man far more maligned in the tabloid press than he is in our film to remind people that he is not just the weird, white haired Australian dude wanted in Sweden, hiding in an embassy behind Harrods. But a true force to be reckoned with, achieved the realization of the great ideal.

I’m proud to be involved in tackling such a contentious character and script. There is only personal truth in my opinion, and the film should provoke debate and not consensus. It should be enjoyable and ultimately empowering to realize that Julian has spearheaded a movement that is the foundations stone of ‘The Fifth Estate,’ people journalism and what that is capable of including finding out the ‘truth’ for yourself.

The Fifth Estate [Official Trailer]

Best Film Ever #9: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Film Review by Don Kaye [Rotten Tomatoes]
Post Create by Jk the secret keeper
Illustrated by j. kiley
Post Created on Thursday 7th November 2013
Posted On Friday 8th November 2013
FILM FRIDAY

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Adapted from Tennessee Williams Play

This dynamic and commanding adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play focuses on a troubled Southern family and the discord over their dying father’s millions.

Wealthy plantation owner Big Daddy Pollitt (Burl Ives), celebrating his 65th birthday, is visited by his sons, Brick (Paul Newman) and Gooper (Jack Carson).

He has cancer, but a doctor has deliberately and falsely declared it in remission. Seemingly perfect son Gooper and his wife, Mae (Madeleine Sherwood), have several children and are anxiously expecting to inherit Daddy’s millions.

By contrast, Big Daddy’s “favorite,” Brick, is a has-been football star who’s taken to drinking his days away since the suicide of his “best friend” a year earlier.

He resents his wife, Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor), because he believes that she had an affair with his deceased friend. As a result, he refuses to sleep with her, although she remains devoted to him.

Since Brick and Maggie have failed to produce any grandchildren, Big Daddy is inclined to leave his estate to Gooper, but Maggie attempts to prevent that by telling him that she is pregnant.

Cat on a Hot Tine Roof [Elizabeth Taylor & Paul Newman talking]

Big Daddy knows better, yet he recognizes that Maggie loves Brick so much that she would be willing to do anything for him.

Although Brick is self-destructive and resentful, unable to come to terms with his losses, it takes Big Daddy’s recognition of his own mortality to make Brick change his perspective.

Brick’s struggle with his sexual identity, and the nature of his relationship with his “friend,” had to be toned down for mass consumption, although this intelligently written and acted film covers such topics as infertility, adultery, and alcoholism that were still considered taboo in the 1950s.

Newman brings depth and feeling to the role as Brick, while Taylor succeeds brilliantly in portraying Maggie as a passionate and understanding woman despite her own real-life emotional turmoil over the death of her husband, at the time, producer Mike Todd. [He died in a plane crash. Elizabeth Taylor was devastated. note by Jk.]

Camille Paglia wrote on Elizabeth Taylor

“She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses women’s ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm.

Exactly. At that time, you have to realize, Elizabeth Taylor was still being underestimated as an actress. No one took her seriously — she would even make jokes about it in public. And when I wrote that piece, Meryl Streep was constantly being touted as the greatest actress who ever lived. I was in total revolt against that and launched this protest because I think that Elizabeth Taylor is actually a greater actress than Meryl Streep [I love Meryl Streep but I must agree, I love Elizabeth Taylor and she is a magnificent Actress], despite Streep’s command of a certain kind of technical skill.

To me, Elizabeth Taylor’s importance as an actress was that she represented a kind of womanliness that is now completely impossible to find on the U.S. or U.K. screen. It was rooted in hormonal reality — the vitality of nature. She was single-handedly a living rebuke to postmodernism and post-structuralism, which maintain that gender is merely a social construct. Let me give you an example. Lisa Cholodenko’s “The Kids Are All Right” is a truly wonderful film, but Julianne Moore and Annette Bening — who is fabulous in it and should have won the Oscar for her portrayal of a prototypical contemporary American career woman — were painfully scrawny to look at on the screen. This is the standard starvation look that is now projected by Hollywood women stars — a skeletal, Pilates-honed, anorexic silhouette, which has nothing to do with females as most of the world understands them. There’s something almost android about the depictions of women currently being projected by Hollywood.

Elizabeth Taylor has been a colossal pagan goddess…my sensibility as a culture critic and as a feminist was deeply formed by her. In the U.S. in the 1950s, blondes were the ultimate Aryan ideal…And then there was Elizabeth Taylor with that gorgeous, brunette, ethnic look. She looked Jewish, Italian, Spanish, even Moorish! She was truly transcultural — it was a radical resistance to the dominance of the blond sorority queens and cheerleaders. And then her open sexuality in that puritanical period! It was so daring…

There was a long feminist attack on the Hollywood sex symbol as a sex object, a commodified thing, passive to the male gaze, and it’s such a crock! …There’s that incredible moment in the bar [Elizabeth Taylor in the film "Butterfield 8] where she’s wearing a svelte black dress and she and Laurence Harvey are fighting. He grabs her by the arm, and she grinds her stiletto heel into his elegant shoe. It’s male vs. female — a ferocious equal match. He’s strong, but she’s strong too! That scene shows the power and intensity of heterosexuality, with all its tensions and conflicts. It also shows how terrible current Hollywood filmmaking is — how false and manufactured sex has become. There’s no real eroticism anymore.

* * * * * * *

Taylor’s acting has been resurrected by Turner Classic Movies, which is exposing new generations to her films, minus the off-screen publicity — scandals, illnesses, tragedies and melodramas — that accompanied her for her entire life.

…if you want to see what the Taylor legend is really about, some of my favorites are: “A Place in the Sun” (George Stevens, 1951), “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (Richard Brooks, 1958), “Suddenly, Last Summer” (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959), “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (Mike Nichols, 1960 — for which Taylor won her second Oscar for best actress) — all but the first of which, oddly, are based on stage plays. — Modified by Jennifer Kiley

Cat on a Hot Tine Roof Trailer [1958]

Best Film of All Time #6 — Casablanca
Review Written by Jennifer Kiley
Posted Created On 15th January
Posted On Friday 6th December 2013
FILM FRIDAY

SPOILERS SPRINKLED THROUGH REVIEW BUT ENDING NOT GIVEN AWAY

“Here’s looking at you kid.”

There are so many memorable lines and scenes in the film Casablanca.

Casablanca (1942) – Directed by Michael Curtiz

Starring: Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine, Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund, Peter Lorre as Ugarte, Claude Raines as Louie – (Head of Police/Rick’s Friend), Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo, Sydney Greenstreet as Ferrari – Proprietor of the night club The Blue Parrot.

Just one of the fifty films a studio would make each year back in the day. Casablanca was just one of those films thrown into that collection. Who knew it would spring forth and become the success that it is. Today, it is considered one of the top romantic films of all time.

Won for Best Picture Oscar 1942. One of the most universally admired films ever made. On most lists of the greatest films of all times. Even people who don’t like old films or black and white films love Casablanca. Roger Ebert said he doesn’t think he’s heard of any negative reviews of this film ever. All the characters are all good except the Nazis. Vichy are the French who collaborate with the Nazis.

Rick’s Cafe Americain in Casablanca in French Morocco, where everyone went for entertainment or to hang out for a drink or to go to the back room where there is gambling going on. Here, in Casablanca, some may obtain exit visas but others may wait and wait and wait. At the beginning of the film, you find out that some couriers were killed in the desert and robbed of exit visas. Officials wanting to see a man’s papers, causes the man to freak out, his papers are not in order, so he runs and is shot and killed because he didn’t halt when ordered to.

Life is meaningless in Casablanca.

When Louie, the head of the police, is asked by Major Strasser, what is being done about the murder of the couriers, his answer is: “We’ve rounded up the usual suspects.” No one likes Nazis and the head of the Nazis in this movie doesn’t make them any more popular and maybe makes them even less popular. The Marseillaise is the present day French National Anthem. Remember that when you watch Casablanca.

Ugarte shows up and talks to Rick. Wants to have a drink with Rick but as a rule he doesn’t drink with any of the guests of his night club. Ugarte likes to brag to Rick. He just is looking for Rick’s approval but knows that Rick despises him but he is the only person that Ugarte trusts. Rick does finally seem impressed with him. You’ll have to watch the movie to find out why.

Ferrari wants Rick’s place. He is always trying to buy it. It’s the best place in town. Sasha hangs out there and is sort of Rick’s girl friend and is a bit of an alcoholic. It’s understandable she wants to drink the times are during the 2nd World War and it is making everyone edgy and the French are being ruled by the Germans.

Louie and Rick get involved in a conversation and Louie asks why Rick came to such a God Forsaken place like Casablanca. Rick’s a smart ass and says: “It’s for the water.” But, of course, it is a desert. Rick’s is permitted to stay open because he just doesn’t want to get involved. But he has in his hands something that a lot of people are looking for but no one has any idea what that is. Louie tells Rick there is a famous patriot of the war headed for Casablanca. A member of the Gestapo, Major Strasser, is expected at the club. He is a thoroughly disagreeable Nazis but then what Nazi isn’t. That I may say often.

A major happening occurs at Rick’s but he reassures everyone to settle down and get back into enjoying themselves. Rick actually sits down with the Nazis. The Nazis make mention about invading New York. Rick warns them about staying away from certain sections of New York. They may not be safe. They start in talking about Victor Lazslo being on his way. Rick assuring them that he doesn’t plan on getting involved.

Victor Laszlo and Ilsa Lund eventually show up as expected and walk through the cafe and take a seat in the night club. Expect that many will be approaching Victor fairly often because of his importance and how nervous they make the Nazis. Ilsa starts asking about the piano player and who owns the Night Club. Louie tells her it is a man named Rick. Major Strasser is introduced and acts like the ass that he is. Starts applying his power over Laszlo.

It is evident that Ilsa and Victor are close but at this time we know nothing of their relationship other then they are traveling together. Victor leaves her at table to meet a man at the bar and finds out about Ugarte.

Ilsa wants to speak to the piano player. His name is Sam and she asks him to play some of the old songs. There is a sadness between Sam regarding Rick. She wants him to play a the song “As Time Goes By.” Sam sings the song for her. Out comes Rick telling Sam he’s not suppose to play that song. Rick sees Ilsa sitting at her table. The last time Rick saw Ilsa was in Paris when the Germans marched in to take over the city. He was unnerved seeing her again. He was so not himself that he actually had a drink with all at the table breaking his precedent of not drinking with guests of the night club The Americain.

Later back in his rooms, Rick has a bottle, and tells Sam he is not planning on going to bed. He thinks Ilsa is going to show up. Sam isn’t going to leave his boss alone. He starts getting maudlin. “Of all the gin joints in all the world, she walks into mine.” He wants Sam to play “As Time Goes By.” Sam doesn’t want to open the wounds.

Flashback: Paris with Rick and Ilsa driving around in a convertible. then down by the Seine. In the hotel drinking champagne. “Who are you really and what were you before and what did you think?” Ricks asks. Ilsa’s response: “We said no questions.” All the best lines in these scenes. So many to write down and remember. She reveals an answer without the question. Watch the movie to find out what she told Rick.

Outside, newspapers are being passed around. The Germans are coming I believe are the headlines and what they are saying in French over the microphones. There is a lot of action going on out in the streets.

The most famous line is spoken by Rick toasting champagne with Sam and Ilsa: “Here’s looking at you kid.” Everything is falling apart. “Where were you ten years ago?” Rick said he was looking for a job. For some reason there is a price on Rick’s head but no one knows why. It’s time for everyone to leave Paris. Their suppose to meet at the train station from where they will be leaving. Ilsa loves him so much and the war, she hates that in just the opposite emotion. She thinks that they will be taken apart. “Kiss me as if it is the last time.”

It’s raining at the train station. With three minutes until last train leaves. No Ilsa but Sam and Rick are waiting. There is a note from the Hotel. Fade Out Paris Train Station as you watch the rain wash the ink off of the note in Rick’s hand.

Fade In: Rick’s Rooms enter Ilsa. She wants to talk to him, to tell him a story. It’s about a girl who meets a man, a very courageous man. She looked up to him. She thought it was love. Who did she leave him for? Laszlo or others in between?

Victor and Ilsa meet Strasser at Police station. Strasser guarantees Laszlo will never receive an exit visa. His only way to leave is to be a traitor to his people. Do you really think he is the type of man to be a traitor. Nazis have no sense of integrity so they do not understand an enigma like Victor Laszlo. An important person to their leaving has been reported to be dead.

Rick visits The Blue Parrot and talks with Ferrari, who wants the letters of transit. He tells Rick he thinks he knows where the letters are. Rick purposely left his club so the police would have a chance to ransack it. Louie’s men were impressively destructive at Rick’s Place in order to win points with Major Strasser. Louie blows with the wind. He is with the Vichy. The Vichy being the French who go along with the Nazis and reluctantly support the French. The French who are loyal to their own country feel betrayed by the Vichy.

A young woman comes to Rick to plead for some help. She will have to sleep with Louie if her husband doesn’t win enough money so they can afford a visa. If they use only the money they have there would be nothing left. Louise fully expects her to have sex with him if the money isn’t won. Louie sees that the young woman and Rick are being obvious about conspiring. They are all in the backroom where the gambling goes on. Louie is an odd duck. Louie accuses Rick of being a rank sentimentalist.

Victor has a visit with Rick. The Underground tell Victor all sorts of very impressive things about activities that Rick was involved in during the war.

In Rick’s Cafe, the Nazis are singing about the Fatherland. It is so despicable to the French in the club that they have a singing competition. Guess who wins. Strasser is not very satisfied. He tells Louie to find an excuse to close Rick’s. He tells Rick the reason is because he is shocked that gambling is going on in his club.

Strasser just keeps getting creepier when he threatens Ilsa.

Later Ilsa and Victor speak about the letters of transit and what Rick said about asking his wife why he won’t give up the letters.

Ilsa goes to Rick’s rooms and tries to get letters from him. She wants to tell him what really happened in Paris. The feelings between them, have they been buried or are they gone? The truth comes out. She had no hope that Victor was alive when she was in Paris with Rick.

Victor and Rick talk. They are not that far apart in what they believe.

Louie and Rick talk about letters. Louie doesn’t like Strasser.

Approaching the final few scenes of the film. Cafe Americain is still closed by order of the Prefect of Police. Ferrari has taken over the Cafe. Louie thinks he is at Cafe to arrest Laszlo but Rick surprises him and makes him call the airport to tell them that there is to be no trouble about two letters of transit. Everything is building up to the excitement of what is all going to culminate in some of the biggest surprises yet in the film.

Best closing scenes in any movie and best closing lines. Memorable til the final line.

For the rest of the film and to fill in all the spaces that I have left out, you will need to find a copy of this film on DVD or streaming from online or whatever source you are able to find to watch the whole thing and to see how it ends. It is a thoroughly amazing film to watch. It seems the perfect film in detail, dialogue, scenes, settings, storyline, acting and durability. It has all the perfect elements and the best acting. Filled with sentiment and sacrifice. I first saw this film when I was in my 20s. It was such a surprise that I did not see it when I was a kid. It is understandable for older children and a fascinating film for all adults.

The following videos do have SPOILERS so watch them if you have seen the film already or if you don’t mind seeing scenes before seeing the film. I am sure a great many of you have watched this film. But if you haven’t, it should be on everyone’s’ film list as a must see. The sheer acting alone and the love story and the screenplay is brilliant. The cast is to die for. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman play the leads. They are two of the finest actors of all times. Worthy of anyone’s time to find out how great they are in Casablanca.

No one had any idea what a remarkable film this was going to turn out to be. The special benefit of this film is you get to hate the Nazis and you get to curse them out without impunity. It has the most classic lines of almost any film ever made. Enjoy the videos and seriously consider locating this film if you haven’t seen it and find it so you can watch it again. “Here’s Looking At You Kid.” —Written by Jennifer Kiley

Tribute To Casablanca
Filled With Spoilers

Casablanca La Marseillaise

All About the Classic Movie “Casablanca”

Dead Again
Film Review by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
Created Thursday 12th Dec. 2013
Posted On Friday 13th Dec. 2013
FILM FRIDAY
Dead Again

[Life after love. Love after life.]

After the title “Dead Again,” the film opens with the word MURDER. Followed by headlines of the murder mixed amongst the opening credits. Headline: STRAUSS ARRESTED. TRIAL OPENS TODAY. STRAUSS FOUND GUILTY December 10th 1949. STRAUSS GETS DEATH. Strauss begins singing a lament in the background toward the end of the credits. Fade In to Roman Strauss [Kenneth Branagh] getting a haircut. He is visited by one member of the press Mr. Gray Baker [Andy Garcia].

Roman Strauss wants a favor from Mr. Baker. After all he has been writing all about his arrest, trial, guilty verdict and his death sentence. Mr. Gray Baker owed Roman Strauss to print his request of an exact quote, “I loved my wife and that I love her forever.”

Roman continues to talk when Mr. Baker asks him, “You truly believe you are lucky to die?”

Roman looks intently at Mr. Baker. His response is, “This is all far from over.”

“But you still killed her?” Mr. Gray Baker asks Roman. Strauss gives Mr. Baker a kiss behind the ear. Gray Baker is an important character to follow.

Roman Strauss is then taken away.

There is commotion as Strauss walks down the hall to face his death. At the end of the hall, Roman raises his hand. As he brings it down, he shouts, “These are for you.”

The past is very Film Noir and Gothic, [In opening, an inside joke, the date 12/10/49, it is Kenneth Branagh’s birthday]. The film has the influences such as Laura by Preminger, Wells, and Hitchcock’s Rebecca. The ideas of hypnosis, regression and reincarnation scared other directors away from making this film. With the script by Scott Frank [later to write the screenplay for "Get Shorty," "Minority Report," "Marley & Me," "The Wolverine," plus others], in the “Dead Again” script, there is an undercurrent of humor, and a flow into the dark side.

When we enter the present, a woman wakes up screaming. Camera switches to the classic Gothic gates, a la Citizen Kane, with a large G-Clef in the center where the iron gates close. [Remember the G-clef]. She is staying at a Catholic Orphanage. The priest wants her out. The kind nun caring for her argues she has no place to go. He gives her the name Mike Church. Tells her to contact him. He owes the priest favors. An good, honest name for a P.I. whose haunt is LA, he drives a red, convertible sports car. His main focus is missing persons. He accepts the case of the mysterious screaming woman [Emma Thompson]. First thing he discovers is she has amnesia and is unable to speak.

A stranger shows up at Mike’s door the day he has placed an ad hoping someone will know who the screaming woman is. He is a hypnotist who wants to help Mike discover her identity. He tries some hypnosis, to Mike’s objections, but almost immediately gets some results. She screams out some words, then reverts back to being unable to speak.

The hypnotist, Franklyn Madson, [Derek Jacobi], offers his assistance. Mike brings his mystery woman to the “Laughing Duke,” an antique shop where Madson hypnotizes his clients to locate antiques while he has them under. Mike wants to see if he will be able to help solve the mystery of her amnesia, her inability to speak, and what exactly are her nightmares.

While under hypnosis she begins having what appear to be flashbacks. She is taken to taken to the past where she begins remembering Roman Strauss with his wife Margaret. It is as if she were actually there with him. Her descriptions come from the effects of the hypnosis. She talks of Roman and Margaret’s wedding and of their careers. Margaret’s is flourishing while Roman’s struggling with his career in the US. He tries to compose his own music but it isn’t coming and offers to score films aren’t successful either. His music is too good. He had to leave his homeland in Europe. He was ill and his wife died. His personal housekeeper, Inga and her son, Frankie, were able to get him to the States successfully.

At the reception, Margaret has a talk with Inga and Frankie. She reminded them they were to have moved their living quarters to another part of the mansion before the wedding. Inga questions her, saying that Mr. Strauss had not asked them to. Margaret made it clear she was now Roman’s wife and it made no difference, they must listen to her.

Roman is madly in love with Margaret. For their marriage, he gives her a special gift, an anklet. Moments later, Madson brings her out of the trance. While he is talking to Mike, she speaks, asking for a glass of water. All are thrilled. Madson is all excited about what came out of the trance. He shows them a Life magazine with photos of the marriage of Roman Strauss and to his wife Margaret. The mystery woman looks a great deal like Margaret. Her amnesia is still very much intact and is confused by it all.

The hypnosis continues with Mike joining in by going under, both are bringing up effective results, and some revelations are very unusual. The strongest memory coming from the screams in her nightmares. They involve the murder of a pianist, Margaret, by her husband Roman Strauss in late 1948. After this result, when the session is finished for the day, Madson calls out to a voice, saying, “In a moment, mother.”

Mike takes her to see Cozy Carlisle [Robin Williams], a former psychiatrist, but lost his license. After Mike explains the session she just had, the Doc tells them it sounds like past life regression. “Sometimes a trauma in a past life can lead you to a trauma in a present life.” “Karma. You burn someone in a past life they turn around and burn you in this life.”

Some simple memories return to her, but nothing substantial. Mike gets some help from his friend, Pete [Wayne Knight] at the newspaper, who placed the first ad. And Mike starts looking into the story of Roman Strauss through old copies of newspapers, specifically the articles, which there are a plethora, written by Mr. Gray Baker [Andy Garcia]. She says “Hello” to Pete. He thinks her voice is great.

Mike takes her out to eat at a beach café, where they start to bond. He pretends to read the tea leaves for her. This is a fun scene, and when he christens her “Grace.” Rain starts shortly there after, and a romantic moment unfolds.

Weirdos keep coming out of the woodwork, trying to confuse “Grace’s” recovery. But the work with Madson, the hypnotist continues. Time to travel back in time to Roman and Margaret. The excitement keeps building from frame to frame, scene to scene, and reel to reel. The past is just as enthralling as the present.

Fitting the pieces together in the past of Roman and Margaret, leads back into the present with Mike and “Grace.” What do they have to do with the other? Is there any connection between Margaret and “Grace?” And what about Mike Church? How does he fit into any of this?

It is a finely designed film, with heightened emotions building up as piece by piece everything eventually falls together. You need to allow the tension to build and the mind to be free of any preconceived notions of what you think is real and possible. Do not forget any characters. The script is so tightly written and played out, every nuance is important to remember. I have seen the film “Dead Again” multiple times. It holds me spellbound every time.

Keep the past fresh in your mind as you watch the present unfolding. Watch out for the danger. Trust no one. Suspect everyone. There is a scene, I promise, I won’t give it away. I will just say you will make a face and go, “Wwwwhhhhhoooooaaaaa!!!” Not sure if that is the exact sound everyone will make.

My favorite line of the film is: “Well, I, for one am very interested in seeing what is going to happen next.”

Emma Thompson is magnificently strong as Margaret and brilliantly delicate, blowing the audience away as “Grace.” It was my first Emma Thompson experience. I didn’t know her at all. I fell in love at first site and continue to love her today. She is an exceptional actor and screenwriter.

Kenneth Branagh is exceptionally tender, plus scary as Roman Strauss and gently forceful, as well as a persistent protector as Mike Church. Kenneth had another extremely important role, he is the Director of “Dead Again.” So, he played a German composer, an American P.I., directed the film “Dead Again,” and he is excellent in all the parts he undertook.

A very dynamic duo, Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh. Where were the Awards? There should have been awards. Plus they are British doing the roles of three Americans and one German.

These were my theatre days, when I just picked out a film that sounded good. Choosing “Dead Again,” what a perfect decision. It didn’t just sound good, it is a fantastic film. Edge of the seat from the first scene until the very last moment. I give this 5***** stars out five.

This movie is from the 1990′s. Every aspect is excellent from the script, its direction, performances, music, editing, it grabs hold of you and lifts you up into the ride of your life. Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, [when “Dead Again” was made, Kenneth and Emma were husband and wife], played two roles in the past and two roles in the present. Past and present required separate clothing designs, hairstyles, and British accents turned into American for both and one character in German for Kenneth. The jewel on top was their parts were of two people in love and destined to be together forever.

I love “Dead Again” from the second the projector starts rolling the very first time. Every second of it a ride through a thriller, love story, character development, and a lasting treasure.

Dead Again — Trailer — Emma Thompson-Kenneth Branagh-Derek Jacobi

Directed by Kenneth Branagh

Kenneth Branagh as Roman Strauss / Mike Church
Emma Thompson as Grace / Margaret Strauss
Andy Garcia as Gray Baker
Derek Jacobi as Franklyn Madson
Wayne Knight as ‘Piccolo’ Pete Dugan
Hanna Schygulla as Inga
Campbell Scott as Doug
Robin Williams as Doctor Cozy Carlisle

Mystery/Thriller
Rated R
English
1991
107 min

[Original Written for Expats Post. Will Be Published Early Monday 30th December 2013]

Sliding Doors
Film Review by Jennifer Kiley
Created on 26th December 2013
Posted on Friday 27th December 2013
FILM FRIDAY

“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition” — Monty Python

What if your life split into two timelines? In one timeline, you make your morning train, the other, someone mugs you, smashes your head into a tree, a kind British taxi driver takes you to the hospital. The split completely alters the experiences of your two lives, two different synchronicities. In one reality, you get fired, in the other, you don’t make it to work. You come home early, the other, you don’t make it home until the correct amount of time later. After things at home have time to move into a different moment, creating an alternate future, causing two parallel realities.

The film, Sliding Doors, involves Helen [Gwyneth Paltrow] meeting a new man, while still living with Gerry [John Lynch], One timeline remains with Gerry, a novelist, she is supporting. He is supposed to be writing his novel. In the other timeline, things come to an abrupt conclusion.

It’s a brilliantly conceived realistic fantasy, totally believable. How it all turns out, is well worth the time put in to watching, as the two realities evolve. Ultimately, turning out an ending with a twist. The whole film is one twisted curve. The story is enchanted. You make your choices. It’s was easy for me. It makes my best and favorites list. What is not to crave and love?

The complexity, a brilliantly written screenplay, superb acting by a fine cast. Gwyneth Paltrow [Helen] and John Hannah [James] are in top form. John Hannah is someone with whom to fall in love. He is a genuinely fine and sensitive actor. His first film that appeared outside the UK was Four Weddings and a Funeral. His reading of W.H. Auden’s Funeral Blues was an especially painful, yet tender moment.

John Lynch and Jeanne Tripplehorn play the jesters, though irritating characters, carry off their roles sadly, pathetically, yet comically. It is impossible not to feel these two are not exactly on your favorite characters list. But there is always a need for antagonists. And most times you don’t like them, yet can appreciate their need in the film, or where would be the negative for the positive to repel? .

Lydia [Jeanne Tripplehorn] is a tremendous pain and cruel to boot. Gerry [John Lynch], the man Helen lives with is a ball-less, unfaithful, pathetic jerk. These are my truthful prejudices.

In the timeline, where Helen gets to know James life and becomes an integral part. This is the life I enjoy watching develop the most. If you decide to watch the film Sliding Doors, and I highly recommend it, you will be following a journey through regrouping and beginning your life from the start again. The alternate timelines are living inside of a blindness to what is happening around them.

Movie Connections: Sliding Doors — John Hannah [James]

Altering time is fascinating. Watching new possibilities grow, while you are living your life as it was given to you. At the same exact time being given a new life while the old life continues in an almost similar direction, just arriving separately.

The ending, I won’t even go anywhere near what happens there. I do recommend “you start at the beginning until you come to the end, then stop.” —Lewis Carroll. It is well worth the journey. Without telling you the culmination of the story, I will say it is imaginative.

Sliding Doors is fascinating to watch. Curious how it makes you feel. You will route for Helen all the way, but which one? What will you think of James? He has his secrets as well. There are secrets everywhere. Characters you just don’t like. Maybe I am being too judgmental but some behaviors are really not honorable.

Sliding Doors is definitely about love. Real love. I am not sure if Gerry knows what he feels. You, as the audience, decide that conclusion. I am not enamored of him. Where my allegiances lie, I haven’t hidden. But my letting that out will not give you any idea what this story is trying to share. Feeling love and caring and knowing when you see it and feel it.

I keep returning to the ending. It surprised me the first time I watched Sliding Doors. It may surprise everyone who watches it. The creativity of the mind who created this story, must be very fertile. I love when someone writes something so different. Something one has not seen in a film before. An original concept, playing with time, in the way Sliding Doors plays it through.

Anyone who likes imagination, thinking, going with the possibilities, being able to expect the unusual and to be able to accept the unique, will love Sliding Doors.

It is a film one can watch more than once. Why? Some films create such ponderings in the mind one needs a dose of their originality to sooth the soul and to believe in the genius of originality. It still truly exists in a world of film on the edge of losing its ability to create plenty of room for new ideas. They sneak in here or there.

Sliding Doors is made for the romantic as well as the psychologically prone individual. The interaction between Helen and James is an invitation to see how feelings slowly develop within a natural growth. The depth of love and feelings are real and should not chase away the male viewer. It is a thinking person’s film. Don’t be afraid of the romance.

The other side of the film is either funny or irritating but in a way that holds the viewer’s attention. For me, I just want to slap some sense into Lydia and Gerry. He is an ass and she is not much higher on the evolutionary ladder.

I prize this film. Obviously, the parts that are irritating would accentuate after you’ve watched this film often enough. Even so, the rest of the film is well worth viewing as often as possible.

The two Helens are reacting so differently and anyone near her lives are different, also. Everyone has to change their perspective on what is real. Keeping them organized is not complicated, instead it is a curious experience to see the different performances.

One more film on my list of films I watch whenever I find the time. It is, to me, like looking into a great work of art, each view you see more deeply into what your senses are perceiving. Each perception brings on different feelings and reactions on other sense levels. Losing myself in the art is a love affair. Losing may not be the most accurate word, pleasure is more succinct. There is emotional pleasure and an indescribable response in experiencing art.

For me, film can most assuredly be considered art. It has such an availability of ranges, in which to explore the mind, the imagination, to express emotions, thoughts, concepts, ideas, non-sense, and a letting go of creativity. To develop a conversation, acting out a concept, to see where it will lead in opening one’s mind to something deeper or new.

Sliding Doors is this film. It is art. It creates a possibility of fantasy, which could hold a particle of truth within its idea of playing with time.

“Always look on the bright side of life.” I love the mentions of Monty Python. What they say and do in their work, mostly non-sense, is filled with humor and ridiculosity.

Sliding Doors asks you to suspend your concept of reality, step into a moment of fantasy and allow that to have possibilities. Go with where it takes you. Accept its consequences.

“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition” — Monty Python

Sliding Doors Trailer

Sliding Doors
Cast:
Helen: Gwyneth Paltrow
James: John Hannah
Gerry: John Lynch
Lydia: Jeanne Tripplehorn

Directed & Written by Peter Howitt [Antitrust with Ryan Philippe, Tim Robbins, and Rachel Leigh Cook. An extreme thriller in the intrigue of super-computers, programmers, inventive ideas, murder, and an exciting film to watch. Edge of the seat philosophy film-making. One I shall watch again really soon & highly recommend for the film viewer who wants excitement with their popcorn. Eat slowly so you don’t choke. Available Free through Redbox Subscription using Roku. Will review in near Future].

Year: [1998]
99m R
Available Presently [26th Dec. 2013]
Amazon Instant Video or Purchase Amazon.com

THE END

The Best Offer
Research by Jk the secret keeper
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Created 15th January 2014
Posted Friday 17th January 2014
CINEMA THEORETICA

The Best Offer Trailer w/ Geoffrey Rush & Donald Sutherland

I was able to watch 10 minutes of this film on a Preview Clip. It is not available yet outside of the theatre on DVD. It is on SAME DAY AS THEATRE for $8.00 HD. For the view into the elements of “The Best Offer,” I was intrigued just watching Geoffrey Rush in the opening moments, alone, sitting properly at a table, in a restaurant of a high reputation, I am sure, in England. Just watching him sit is a curious moment. We discover an important fact regarding his inner life and outer as well. It is his birthday the next day but the wait staff bring him a superbly made dessert with one candle already lit. He watches as the candle burns down. He must leave before Midnight but is sure to inform the wait staff to let the dessert staff know how pleased he is with the cake.

FADE OUT

He walks into his office. It is his birthday. It has circulated he cannot abide Mobile Phones. So, he received only one in his packages this year.

The phone rings. He answers but pretends to be his assistant. A woman is urgent to speak with him. Her father highly recommended him as the one to handle their estate antiques and art work. She is frantic to have him accept the request. He is intrigued but doesn’t reveal his identity nor does he commit himself to meeting with her.

FADE OUT

Auction. He is taking the bids on an antique from the time of Galileo. It brings in over a $Million Euros. The next item is a portrait of a young lady, in her lower teen years. She looks innocent. The bidding starts. This is when Donald Sutherland gets in on the proceedings. D.S. wins the bid for $10,000 Euros. After all is finished, D.S. meets with Him, G.R., in his rooms. He is examining the painting. At first, I thought maybe there was a famous painting under this young lady. But now I am not sure. He gives D.S. a handful of money. I deduct from them both that D.S.’s character is a painter. It gets a bit vague as the scene ends.

FADE OUT

He, G.R., is sitting in a room. As the camera scans and he follows the eye of the camera, we are seeing walls filled with portraits of women of all ages and eras. The curiosity mounts when you view the scan of the immensity of all the portraits. I wondered whether he came upon them in a manner not suiting his position.

There is a sense of mystery in this film. It has me wanting to see this as soon as it becomes available in the way in which I like to watch my cinema.

Out of curiosity, it is my kind of film with a touch of film noir, a woman who is withdrawn from the world who his seeking Him, G.R., out. He eventually, does become interested in the mystery. It has all the elements of a film I would choose to want to see.

Since I have only seen a small length of “The Best Offer,” I can only cast a “cinema theoretica” guess. I would want to see this film. I will when I am able and give an addition to this review. Until then, if you want to see “The Best Offer,” it is suppose to be in theatres and it is available with Xfinity On Demand for a FEE. [Xfinity is Comcast].

[BEST IS FIVE - 5 - ! ! ! ! ! ]

Good Movie Watching .
By Jennifer Kiley