Epinions Recent Reviews for Stephen_Murray

A docudrama about manufacturing felons, Texas style

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:25:50 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Seeing Saintpaulia, commonly called “African violets,” in the 2008 move “American Violet made me wonder if the flower really is African. Saintpaulia really does come from East Africa.The movie’s heroine, Dee Roberts...

Struggles for any measure of respect in rigid, impermeable Egyptian hierarchies

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:03:30 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Although published (both in Arabic and in English) before the blockbuster best-seller The Yacoubian Building, the novella and 16 short stories in Friendly Fire by Alaa al-Aswany were written before it...

Espionage/war/mystery novel from the perspective of a shallow young Russian woman

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:31:35 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - I have not read The Winter Queen, the first Erast Fandorin Mystery by Boris Akunin (born Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili in 1956 in Georgia). The Turkish Gambit was the third published in English (after Murder on the Leviathan,...

Blending cross-cultural romance with team-building genres... successfully!

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:24:38 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Although I’ve never seen any other movie about outsourced jobs, there is something very familiar about "Outsourced" (2008): a coach dubious about his abilities and his job pulls together a motley crew and accomplishes the impossible (usually...

Under the Same Moon: An unpretentious movie with a Big Heart

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:26:26 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - The hurting but determined child setting off to find his mother and getting some very reluctant help from a bitter, scarred adult. Haven’t I seen this before? How about in “Central Station”? But if the child can overcome the resistance...

If she could speak, what would Lot's wife say?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:51:36 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - The title page of Kurt Vonnegut. Jr.'s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death comes with a précis like those 18th-century books: "A fourth-generation German-American now living in easy...

Fugitive emissions

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:54:23 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - It is dispiriting to see how frequent the feeling of isolation remains for young men as they try to come to terms with forbidden desires for men. In "Just a Question of Love," Laurent was close to a cousin who...

Remembered hungers of an only child of a well-off English family

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:31:34 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - "Forget salt and pepper, garlic and lemon. The most successful seasoning for what we eat is a good pinch of nostalgia." The first (and very positive mention) I read of Nigel Slater's memoir Toast was in an Allan Bennett diary entry...

Colorful, Orientalist, ridiculously cast, throwback adventure movie

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:44:25 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - I think that Fritz Lang (1890-1976) was one of the greatest of movie directors ever. I had long been curious about the two-part "Indian epic" that he shot in German, three years after his last Hollywood movie (Beyond a...

Deciding to die alone

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:11:08 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - I liked François Ozon’s "Eight Women" (2002) — with great French actresses from Danielle Darrieux on down in age — a lot, but I was unenamored by "Under the Sand" (2002) even with Charlotte...

A lot of madness in his methods, and madness takes its toll, but gets results

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:46:37 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - The Hong Kong team of Johnnie To and Ka-Fai Wai found a lot for Lau Ching-Wa, the laconic and unorthodox police negotiator in both their "Running Out of Time" movies in "Sun taam" (Mad Detective: the Chinese title means more "Wonderful...

A British "paranoid thriller" set in Northern Ireland of the early-1980s

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:46:19 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Long before he made the historical IRA drama "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" (2006), Ken Loach had made a movie set amidst “the troubles” in Northern Ireland of the early-1980s: “Hidden...

Very good singers at their peak in the last Puccini opera

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:23:06 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Having compared my recently acquired recording of the 1964 La Scale Nilsson/Corelli "Turandot" with the one I’ve had for more than two decades, I concluded that the power couple of the early 1960s sounded...

No one will sleep during Puccini's last opera

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:00:06 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Starting in Santa Fe during August, I have explored a number of operas with which I was not previously acquainted. I have been working my way through a set of recordings of live performances from 1960-65, the peak of Italian tenor Franco Corelli’s...

Japanese town without pity

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:31:33 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Writer-director Kobayashi Masahiro (Man Walking on Snow) seems to me a Japanese outlier of the Dogma school, relying on natural light to make depressing, undramatic movies. Perhaps the most irritating aspect of his...

Good singers in good form in an uninspired verismo opera

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:10:28 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Having only recently come to appreciate the 1896 verismo opera "Andreas Chénier," composed by Umberto Giordano (1867-1948), I thought that perhaps I had missed out and been mistaken about Giordano being a "one-hit wonder." I thought is...

Great singers in top form in a major verismo opera

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:28:05 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - The set of live performances of the great Italian tenor Franco Corelli (1921-2003) in his prime (1956-62) has introduced me to the verismo opera first performed at La Scala in Milan on 28 March 1896, "Andrea Chénier" by Umberto Giordano...

It's easier to like and understand other people's parents than one's own

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:11:59 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - “Kirschblüten
”
(Cherry Blossoms, 2008) was a big hit in Germany. It evidences a sentimentality that I think is particularly German, though not one I would expect in a Doris Dörrie. Maybe it’s just that her movies...

Maybe "Just connect!" isn't good advice.

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:07:52 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Malaysia-born Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang's recurrent obsessions—(in ascending order —are with watermelons in bed, elevators, empty intersecting hallways, water (running or static), and Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-Sheng (who has...

Shooting a documentary about gay Arabs and recognizing oneself as a gay Arab

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:08:39 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - I was pretty sure that I had seen the 2001 movie "The Road to Love" at a film festival back then. The back cover of Abdellah TaÃ¯a's Salvation Army mentioned that he...

Espousing rabidly rationalist (superhuman) philosophy does not block beastly behavior

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:28:27 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Helen Mirren won her first Emmy, and Peter Fonda won a Golden Globe for the 1999 Showtime adaptation of Barbara Branden's memoir of the inner circle of the Ayn Rand cult. The viewpoint is from someone exiled by Rand despite having married a fervent...

A page-turner (once it gets going) about Moroccans of high and low class

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:01:44 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - I think that Laila Lalami is a very good writer in her third or fourth language, English. It would be faint praise to bill her as "the best Moroccan-American novelist," not a category in which there is much competition.Her second novel, Secret...

A Farcical German "Death of a Salesman"

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 16:01:16 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - I think that "Reine Geschmacksache" means "clean taste" in German. The entertaining 2007 German comedy (that is not an oxymoron!) with that title was released in English as "Fashion Victims."Who are the victims? The buyers of both the dowdy,...

Seven miles can be very far and very dangerous distance

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 14:16:36 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Written in English by Laila Lalami (who was born in Rabat in 1968, where she lived through earning a B.A. in English from Université Mohammed V In 1991) is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and...

A novel(la) of sexual violence that I don't regard as a "classic"

Sun, 8 Nov 2009 18:59:25 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - The back cover of Season of Migration to the North, first translated into English in 1969 (having been published in Arabic three years earlier) has an assertion from Edward Said that it is "among the six finest novels to be written in modern Arabic...