The Telluride Film Festival is underway. Scott Simon talks with Elvis Mitchell about this year’s event.
Telluride is well worth a visit.
Category: Movies
Osama
This stunning film, the first to be made in a post-Taliban Afghanistan and inspired by a newspaper account read by director Siddiq Barmak, recounts the efforts of a family of women to survive under an oppressive regime. To eke out a meager living, they dress up their 12-year-old girl, Osama, as a boy so she can work
Battle of Information & Ideas
Verlyn Klinkenborg nicely summarizes recent news in the recording industry’s battle against file sharing:
But this isn’t just a legal battle, of course. It’s a battle of information and ideas. A new book from Lawrence Lessig called “Free Culture” makes a forceful, cogent defense of many forms of file sharing. And ? perhaps worst of all from the industry’s perspective ? a new academic study prepared by professors at Harvard and the University of North Carolina concludes, “Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero.” This directly counters recording industry claims that place nearly all the blame for declining CD sales on illegal file sharing.
Errol Morris Interview
Rob Thomas interviews Errol Morris on the Fog of War.
“They’re the odd couple of American film in 2004, Robert McNamara and Errol Morris.
McNamara is the former U.S. secretary of defense who was one of the prime forces behind the Vietnam War, who ended up hated by both the left and the right.”
Nowhere in Africa
An excellent film! (I believe this played briefly at the Orpheum) Available on DVD.
Shortly before World War II, a Jewish couple and their young daughter emigrate to Kenya from Germany to escape the Nazis. Not all members of the family are happy with this drastic change — but going home isn’t an option. Ultimately, they must all come to terms with a new life in a new continent. Director Caroline Link’s epic drama won the 2002 Oscar for best foreign film.
UPDATE: Interestingly, the University of Wisconsin Press published the autobiographical novel upon which the film was based.
The Fog of War
McNamara speaks at Berkeley.
Robert McNamara, the defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, fielded questions from center stage in a packed auditorium at his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, for the first time since graduating in 1937.
Webcast
Since Errol Morris’s (a UW Grad) The Fog of War” was released last year, Mr. McNamara has appeared before several audiences, including those at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and one last month in Washington.
Spellbound/Outbound/SchoolBound?
Glenn Reynolds discusses the fabulous documentary, Spellbound in light of the current outsourcing rage.
Glenn also points to a few education blogs: Kimberley Swygert | Joanne Jacobs | Erin O’Connor.