Call No.: DS79.76.A41 [check availability] Title / Director: Alive day memories [videorecording] : home from Iraq / Alpert, Jon.

This documentary film starts off stating that there are two birthdays that the soldiers from the Iraq War will never forget : their birthdays and their alive days – the day that they narrowly escaped death. James Gandolfini (The Sopranos) interviewed ten Iraq war veterans who were deployed during the Iraq war and returned injured and some of them with their limbs amputated. Some these veterans now have prosthetic arms and limbs & are facing post traumatic stress.

They share their experiences with him and their encounters with the attacks. It features the soldier’s pre-war lives and their lives that they are leading now. The film dwells into the physical and emotional effects that the war has caused for these soldiers. It was stated that the percentage of amputees returning from the Iraq war is the highest since the Civil War.

I always believe that both sides are affected by wars. Though this documentary focuses on the war effects from one side, it shows how some of these soldiers felt that they did not belong in the war and it was not their war. And others felt that they did what they had to, serving their country. The emotional part is when they were being asked about the future, some were confident and some have yet to overcome the traumatic stress.

The DVD is available in the Art, Design & Media Library. Please be forewarned that this documentary film contains harrowing footage of explosions & ambushes released by insurgents.

Title: The water horse : legend of the deep

Call No.: PN1995.9.A5W324 [check availability]

Based on the novel by Dick King-Smith, The Water Horse depicts the tale of a friendship between a young Scottish boy and his “pet” which that he discovered at the tide pool while looking for abandoned shells.

Set during World War II, the movie focuses on Angus MacMarrow who lives on an offshore island and discovers that the hatchling from the egg is the lochness monster, or the Water Horse as commonly know. He named it Crusoe taken after the character Robinson Crusoe in Treasure Island. Central to the plot is Angus’ role as a protector to Crusoe from the destruction by the war and from Angus’ family and friends. I can’t help but notice the plot’s resemblance to other movies , specifically E.T.

Visual effects are done by WETA, the same visual effects team for Lord of the Rings and King Kong. Though, no one really knows if lochness monsters actually exist, the visual effects team has done a great job in providing the life like forms of the monster’s physical features, starting from an hatchling, which grew ten times its size daily till to a full grown water horse.

The DVD contains bonus features such as the creation of Crusoe using visual effects and behind the scenes featurettes and deleted scenes.

Check out the movie’s theatrical trailer below.

Amedeo Modigliani’s portraits and nudes are some of the most popular images of the 20th century.  He is perhaps best known for simplification and abstraction in his approach to portraiture.   His paintings have garnered much admiration for the de-personalized depiction of the human face that is, at the same time, often imbued with a tenderness that seem to have struck a chord with viewers across space and time.   It was ironically, his foray into sculpture between the intervening years of 1909 to 1914 that helped him to arrive at a stylistic independence that took him further away from the artistic objectives of the avant-garde. 

The movie, loosely based on the life of Modigliani, focuses on his relationship of two years with his companion, Jeanne Hebuterne, who was just nineteen when they met at the Academie Colarossi.  The film perpetuated much of the “myths, legends and cliches” that have come to be associated with the bohemian artist who died at the young age of 35.  Despite its fictionalized account of Modigliani’s life, the film has succeeded in engaging the audience by providing a glimpse of a highly talented and passionate young artist who was determined to create an artistic path that would ultimately comprise of harmonious and beautiful forms rather than those that his contemporaries created in order to challenge the norm at the turn of the twentieth century.

The movie is available in the Art, Design and Media Library (ADM Library).
Call number: PS3553.H4367G525

A Room with a View by the English novelist E. M. Forster is a love story set in both Italy and England somewhere between the years 1901-1910. The plot goes beyond that of a simple love story as it also explores themes on class snobbery, propriety and conflicting desires in Edwardian England.

The book has been successfully adapted by Merchant Ivory Productions which has produced one of the most best-loved screen adaptations to date and brought it to a wider and younger mainstream audience (who may or may not be familiar with E.M. Forster’s works).

Merchant Ivory Productions was founded in the 1960’s by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. Their successful collaboration has included Howards End (1992) and Remains of the Day (1993) which have garnered much praise for their “visual beauty, their mature and intelligent themes, and the shrewd casting and fine acting.”

What I enjoyed most about the movie were the scenes that were shot in Italy where we catch glimpses of Gothic and Renaissance architecture in Florence in the form of the Santa Croce, the Duomo, the Ospedale degli Innocenti as well fresco paintings by Giotto in the Bardi Chapel. These artistic scenes bring the book alive so to speak as we ponder the Italianate culture of fiery passion and emotions that seems to be at odds with Edwardian values of restraint and convention rather than spontaneity and aberration. And these conflicting desires and values are wonderfully played out by the main cast of Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Daniel Day Lewis and Judi Dench.

The movie is available in the Art, Design and Media Library (ADM Library).
  Call number: PR6011.O58R777 2004

The book is available in Library 2, Open shelves
  Call number: PR6011.O58R777 

There has been a great deal of media hype about Frida Kahlo recently. I believe that it is due in part to two major exhibitions dedicated to her in 2008.

The biggest exhibition is the Frida Kahlo Centennial in Mexico City scheduled for the summer. This large-scale exhibition will include a retrospective of her work at the
Palacio de Bellas and an exhibition of her personal memorabilia at the Casa Azul, a former home of the artist. And the Philadephia Museum of Art is currently showing a selected collection of her smaller works.

For those of us who are unable to make that special trip to either Mexico or the United States, there are some art resources in the Art, Design and Media Library (ADML) that
could help enhance an appreciation of an artist whose unique vision of art is intricately woven with her own tragic life.

One such resource is a biographical documentary of the artist’s life. This documentary is wonderful in many ways as it gives an excellent background to her early years as an
intelligent and self-assertive young woman bound for medical school.

The documentary on the artist’s life also clearly shows how a near-fatal bus accident would “forever changed the course of her life.” It was her confinement to the bed during her recuperation period that Frida Kahlo took up the brush to paint. We learned that her mother had a mirror installed at the top of her bed canopy to enable her to paint her own image as movements were confining and difficult for her.

This is but a start to the many self-portraits that Frida Kahlo would paint in the course of her life. They bear powerful testimony not only to the physical pain caused by wounds that were never completely healed from the bus crash as much as a moving visual commentary of her turbulent marriage to the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.

Biography : Frida Kahlo is available in the Art, Design and Media Library (ADML). Call Number: ND259.K33F898

Please also click here for a full review of the “Frida Kahlo” exhibition by the New York Times at the Philadelphia Musuem of Art.

Who are the great artists in western art?   Given the canon of western art history, it is surely difficult to pare it down to a mere 12 artists.

Nevertheless, Tim Marlow, an art historian and English TV presenter for an arts programme in the U.K, manages to do just that by exploring the lives and works of 12 great masters from the Renaissance to the Post-Impressionist period.   The series feature popular artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael as well as lesser known German artist like Albrecht Durer and the Flemish master Bruegel.

The Great Artist is divided into 14 episodes where each episode is devoted to one particular artist.   Each episode is an art journey taken together with the presenter as he brings us to a different country in the continent and several different cities in Europe where the featured art works currently reside.   These works of art are not mentioned in a cursory fashion but explored in depth with anecdotes from the lives of the artists thrown in to make it so much more enjoyable for the viewer.

DVDs from The Great Artists series are available in the Art, Design and Media Library (ADML). Call number:  ND35.G786

Jan Vermeer, a much loved Dutch painter today, was in fact an unknown until a French art critic published an essay about him in the mid-nineteenth century.   Even today, very little is known about the painter from Delft except that he died at a relatively young age leaving behind his wife, 11 children and a large debt.

This movie is based on a fictional account of Jan Vermeer’s life between the years 1664-1667.   Tracy Chevalier, author of the book on which the film is based, focused on the later years of his work because the painting the “Girl with a Pearl Earring” is thought to have been produced during this period.

The movie, not unlike the book, explores the relationship between a young maid and Vermeer.   It is a love story bound by social class, religion and the strict moral code and conduct of the era.   The story is told in the first person narrative with Griet, the young maid, at the very centre of the evolving drama.

The movie is spectacular on many different levels.   For many who have seen images of Vermeer’s works, one would be automatically drawn to the cinematography.   The composition, colour and light of some of the scenes often bring to mind images of his works.   It is almost like a movie with stills of his genre paintings that can be seen hanging in the finest museums around Europe and North America.

Particularly compelling is the tightness of the plot and the subtlety of the acting.   Griet, played by Scarlett Johanssen, is a model of restraint and innocence and Jan Vermeer, played by Colin Firth, depicts a fastidious and meticulous man who closely guarded his passion for light and reality as he sought to be true to his calling in life.

The movie is available in the Art, Design and Media Library (ADM Library).
Call number: PS3553.H4367G525

The book is available in the Humanities & Social Sciences Library (HSS Library).
Call number: PS3553.H4367G525