Reviews and Blog Posts: movies

Trained artist, designer, and gentleman Tim Gunn is one of the reasons Project Runway is so popular. Take a mini-course on fashion and check out his five most recommended films on fashion:

Blow-Up - Starring David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave.

Funny Face - Starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire.

Have you ever tried unsuccessfully to find a book or movie in Denver Public Library’s catalog at midnight? Common websites often prove to be enormously helpful. We use Amazon at www.amazon.com to find titles and authors. The Internet Movie Database at www.imdb.com is what we use to find movie titles. Mid Continental Public Library has created a useful database for finding the order of children’s series.

Loss, redemption, and love with a smattering of the supernatural is just a sample of what is available. My film club recently screened La ley de Herodes / Herod's Law and we were amazed how the dark humor surrounding political corruption clearly communicated across the language barrier.

So pull out your readers or practice your Spanish with a sample offering of Mexico's best films!

Babette's Feast

Like Water for Chocolate

Chocolat 

Julie & Julia

Delicatessen

Big Night

PLEASE NOTE: If your request is for an item coming out in February 2011 or later, we suggest waiting and checking the catalog periodically. The Library is busy processing orders for thousands of recently-released and forthcoming titles, so many of your requests may already be in our "to order" queue. Holding off on submitting purchase requests for a few weeks will help to maximize your 30 request per year limit.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

I've been a Colin Firth fan since I first saw him in Shakespeare in Love as the snobby and sniveling Lord Wessex, and I've been an Anglophile for as long as I can remember, so there was no way I was going to miss him play the stammering King George VI in The King's Speech. I saw it this past weekend, and it actually rendered me speechless--a rare moment. Firth is magnificent in this clever film, which is about much more than George's speaking difficulties.

Determined to put a stop to this and introduce some diversity, I asked an unsuspecting table of diners last evening: Why not Funny Girl? One diner felt the film had received too much bad press when first released in 1968 because Omar Sharif, a Franco-Arabic actor, was playing romantic lead to a young Jewish Barbara Streisand. He didn't know that Streisand had earned an Oscar for her performance. Another diner felt the story was too dated (like Maria in the Alps isn’t).

I was reminded while watching Hoop Reality, that only 1.2% of all college basketball players are recruited to the NBA. James is a very talented and lucky man.  A recent trip to watch the Washington Mystics and Los Angeles Sparks (sans an injured Candace Parker) had me wondering about the percentage of young women being recruited to the WNBA.