The writing-directing debut of another offbeat actress, Joey Lauren Adams (Chasing Amy), this is a beautifully observed film, free of condescension toward its Arkansas folk, with an appreciative eye for the plain beauties of small-town life and semi-rural roads, and a sharp ear for three-cushion dialogue. "Did I miss Easter?" Lucy's housemate quietly cracks when she finds Lucy dressed for Sunday-go-to-meetin'; Lucy's trying to reconnect with her estranged dad (a magical, almost wordless performance by the wonderful Scott Wilson), who's started attendi! ng "a new holy-roller church." She also meets a newcomer (Jeff! rey Dono van, excellent) who ought to be Mr. Right ... but nothing quite plays out according to formulaic expectation in this movie--among the most satisfying of 2006, which most people are going to have to discover on DVD. --Richard T. Jameson
You will not need a crystal ball to see where this is going. It works as a middling romance, but is an annoying waste of potential. The script has much to say about finding your true identity, but does ! so with all the sentimentality and depth of a Hallmark card. --Roch elle O'GormanCute-as-a-button Sandra Bullock is a homemaker who learns that her husband and best friend are having an affair. The so-called best friend reveals this information on a national chat show, leaving Bullock devastated and disgraced. Heading back to her small hometown in Texas, she seeks refuge with her eccentric mother. Laconic Harry Connick Jr., a former high-school classmate, attempts to bring Bullock out of her depression and win her heart. He has, you see, been carrying a torch for her since they were kids.
You will not need a crystal ball to see where this is going. It works as a middling romance, but is an annoying waste of potential. The script has much to say about finding your true identity, but does so with all the sentimentality and depth of a Hallmark card. --Rochelle O'GormanNo Description Available.
Genre: Soundtracks & Scores
Media Format: Compact Disk
Rating:
Release Date: 24-APR-2007Three dram! as on 3 DVD in one set.If a broom falls, company is due. When a circle rings the moon, trouble looms, Should you misplace your broom, sorry; a hand vac can't be used in an exorcism rite. Fun and excitement abound in the Owens family of wily witches. One problem, though: the men the Owens women fall in love with are doomed to an untimely death.
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman bring a sparkling screen magic to Practical Magic, adapted from Alice Hoffman's bestseller and directed by Griffin Dunne (Addicted to Love). They play Sally and Gillian Owens, sisters hexed by a centuries -old curse...and coping with a witches brew of events involving a possible love match (Aidan Quinn) for one, a zombie (Goran Visnjic) for the other and a need to resume the age-old witchcraft taught by two doting Owens aunts (Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest). Sit for a spell and enjoy. Actor Griffin Dunne improves a bit on his first film as a director, Addicted to Love, with this dr! ama-comedy about a family of witches. Nicole Kidman and Sandra! Bullock play spell-casting sisters of different temperaments: the former is a high-living, free-spirited sort, while Bullock's character is a homebody who can't get around a family curse that kills the men in their lives. A widowed single mom, Bullock gets into a jam with an abusive Bulgarian (Goran Visnjic) and is helped out by her sibling, but the result brings a good-looking, warm, inquisitive cop (Aidan Quinn) into their lives. The film has a variety of tonal changes--cute, scary, glum--that Dunne can't always effectively juggle. But the female-centric, celebratory nature of the film (the fantasies, the sharing, the witchy bonds) is infectious, and supporting roles by Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing as Kidman and Bullock's magical aunts are a lot of fun. --Tom Keogh
La moria grandissima began its terrible journey ! across the European and Asian continents in 1347, leaving unimaginable devastation in its wake. Five years later, twenty-five million people were dead, felled by the scourge that would come to be called the Black Death. The Great Mortality is the extraordinary epic account of the worst natural disaster in European history -- a drama of courage, cowardice, misery, madness, and sacrifice that brilliantly illuminates humankind's darkest days when an old world ended and a new world was born.
A book chronicling one of the worst human disasters in recorded history really has no business being entertaining. But John Kelly's The Great Mortality is a page-turner despite its grim subject matter and graphic detail. Credit Kelly's animated prose and uncanny ability to drop his reader smack in the middle of the 14th century, as a heretofore unknown menace stalks Eurasia from "from the China Sea to the sleepy fishing villages of coastal Portugal [producing] suffering an! d death on a scale that, even after two world wars and twenty-! seven mi llion AIDS deaths worldwide, remains astonishing." Take Kelly's vivid description of London in the fall of 1348: "A nighttime walk across Medieval London would probably take only twenty minutes or so, but traversing the daytime city was a different matter.... Imagine a shopping mall where everyone shouts, no one washes, front teeth are uncommon and the shopping music is provided by the slaughterhouse up the road." Yikes, and that's before just about everything with a pulse starts dying and piling up in the streets, reducing the population of Europe by anywhere from a third to 60 percent in a few short years. In addition to taking readers on a walking tour through plague-ravaged Europe, Kelly heaps on the ancillary information and every last bit of it is captivating. We get a thorough breakdown of the three types of plagues that prey on humans; a detailed account of how the plague traveled from nation to nation (initially by boat via flea-infested rats); how floods (and the a! ppalling hygiene of medieval people) made Europe so susceptible to the disease; how the plague triggered a new social hierarchy favoring women and the proletariat but also sparked vicious anti-Semitism; and especially, how the plague forever changed the way people viewed the church. Engrossing, accessible, and brimming with first-hand accounts drawn from the Middle Ages, The Great Mortality illuminates and inspires. History just doesn't get better than that. --Kim HughesANCIENT MYSTERIES:BLACK DEATH - DVD Movie
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