Arts + Life

Become a spiritual companion on the ride of a lifetime.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

The same love of a tough game . . .

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

For those of us who endure the suffocating zeal of Ohio State football fans or hear about the football obsession of small-town Massillon, Ohio, "Friday Night Lights" is more of the same. Odessa, Texas, has little else but high school football given the poor economic times of 1988 and the barren world of remote Texas. But it's a true story filled with a game that defines the future of its players and the town, for whom there is little else.

A contemporary curiosity

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

"Trouble was . . . they didn't stay dead."

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time

Like the zombies themselves, films about the undead have unearthed repeatedly since George Romero first exposed us to them in "Dawn of the Dead" in 1978. Not that F. W. Murnau's 1922 "Nosferatu" didn't titillate about vampires and the undead motif; it's just that Romero did it with style and wit, albeit heavy handed with gore and cheap thrills.

Superficially enjoyable.

By John DeSando, WCBE "It's Movie Time"

See it in a theater before you turn into a potato watching it on your crumby couch.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

The British penchant for understatement and the audience's perfect understanding of slackers mix to make zombie spoof "Shaun of the Dead" both funny and appropriate for a society that fosters couch potatoes and underachieving 29 year olds. So universal is the satire that Hollywood moviemaking and dear old mums are not spared.

The attorney general has at least the decency to be confused by bare breasts

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting."

Wordsworth

Nothing is as it seems.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

A beautiful film out of time and step with a lesser world outside.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

In the Gobi desert, where a nomadic tribe tends its camels like Jay Leno his automobiles, a mother rejects a white calf just delivered with difficulty. The society's initiative to bring mother to nurse the child is the center of an otherwise simple plot of "The Story of the Weeping Camel."

It is tennis "love" with no points when the film is finally judged.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

When the opening titles are more inventive than the film, disappointment is palpable: Director Richard Loncraine ("Richard III") can excel in the competitive titles niche, but he can't sustain the creativity for the rest of "Wimbledon" itself. Wait, that sounds like a loser in a tennis match. And so it goes.

See it and love it!

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

Do you wonder where the spirit of "Star Wars," "Indiana Jones," and countless cliff-hanging movies and radio serials went? It's been waiting to surprise us at the end of a summer that saw a surpassing "Spiderman 2" and a forgettable "Lost Skeleton of Cadavra." It comes in an almost perfect form of comic book thrills, imagination, and muted irony: "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow."

It's sure not "Tom and Jerry."

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

A fair representation of the "indie" spirit and a reminder of its limitations.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

Single moms with teenage daughters are heroes for our times: They must be self reliant, tough, tender and suffer the slings and arrows of a culture that worships youth, which in the teen years is unremittingly disrespectful of the adults that made that culture possible.

Successful coasting between the formulaic chase-against-time suspense and the inherently laughable conduct of cell phone users.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

Engrossing drama expertly directed and memorably acted.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

A sumptuous adaptation of the novel helped or hurt by Reese Witherspoon as Becky.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

Just another serial killer thriller.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

The difference might be that Anthony Hopkins wants to be called "Tony," while Ben Kingsley demands to be called "Sir." Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter in "Silence of the Lambs" defined forever the serial killer as witty, charming, and lethal; Kingsley's Benjamin O'Ryan in "Suspect Zero" is none of those but seems to wannabe. Lecter doesn't need to seek respect; O'Ryan wants it badly.

Cinematography that can easily take over the plot.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

"The still, sad music of humanity."

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

And I thought "Dogville" was stylized. Canadian writer/director Guy Maddin ("Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary," "Archangel") has created a film like no other this year except possibly "Triplet's of Belleville." "The Saddest Music in the World" is a "musical" set in Winnipeg in 1933, where Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini) is holding a contest to award $25,000 to the saddest music performer. In "Depression Era dollars," no less.

The real drama is in the talk.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

"But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near."