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FAMOUS PEOPLE WITH EVERYDAY PROBLEMS EPILEPSY - DANNY GLOVER
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Daniel Glover (born July 22, 1946 in San Francisco, California) is an American actor and film director. In his late twenties, he became interested in acting by enrolling in the Black Actors Workshop at the American Conservatory Theater. Deciding that he wanted to be an actor, Danny resigned from his city administration job and soon began his career as a stage actor, which eventually brought him to Los Angeles.
He currently serves as board chair of the TransAfrica Forum, "a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the general public particularly African Americans on the economic, political and moral ramifications of U.S. foreign policy as it affects Africa and the Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America." In March 1998, he was appointed ambassador to the United Nations Development Programme.
He also serves on the Advisory Council for TeleSUR, "Television of the South", a pan-Latin American television network based in Caracas, Venezuela. It began broadcasting on July 24, 2005.
He has been married to Asake Bomani since 1975, and has one child named Mandisa. He also has a younger brother named Martin.
He is probably best known for his role as Los Angeles police Sgt. Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon movie series, and his role as the abusive husband to Whoopi Goldberg's character Celie in The Color Purple.
Among many awards, he has won five NAACP Image Awards, for his achievements as a black actor.
He joined the ranks of actors, such as Humphrey Bogart, Elliott Gould, and Robert Mitchum, who have portrayed Raymond Chandler's private eye detective Philip Marlowe in the episode 'Red Wind' of the Showtime network's 1995 series Fallen Angels.
Glover made his directorial debut with the Showtime channel short film Override in 1994. He graduated from San Francisco State University, where he met his wife.
Politics
Glover's political involvement has been widely covered in America. Glover opposed United States military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. He joined Harry Belafonte in a visit to Venezuela, during which Belafonte condemned President George W. Bush as "the greatest terrorist in the world."
Some conservative commentators, including Michael Medved, criticized Glover for his decision to appear in the fiction movie Saw, which some critics described as gratuitously violent, stating that it conflicts with his political pacifism.
Filmography
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Escape From Alcatraz (1979)
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Patrick McGoohan Director: Don Siegel
One of Clint Eastwood's two most important filmmaking mentors was Don Siegel (the other was Sergio Leone), who directed Eastwood in Dirty Harry, Coogan's Bluff, Two Mules for Sister Sara, and this enigmatic, 1979 drama based on a true story about an escape from the island prison of Alcatraz. Eastwood plays a new convict who enters into a kind of mind game with the chilly warden (Patrick McGoohan) and organizes a break leading into the treacherous waters off San Francisco. As jailbird movies go, this isn't just a grotty, unpleasant experience but a character-driven work with some haunting twists.
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Places in the Heart (1984)
Starring: Sally Field, Lindsay Crouse Director: Robert Benton
Edna Spalding finds herself alone and broke on a small farm in the midst of the Great Depression when her husband the Sheriff is killed in an accident. A wandering black man, Moses, helps her to plant cotten to try and keep her farm and her kids together. She also takes on a blind border, Mr. Will, who lost his sight in the first World War. She must endure storms and harsh labor to try and make her mortage payment on time.
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Silverado (2 Disc Superbit Gift Set) (1985)
Starring: Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn Director: Lawrence Kasdan
Director Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill) clearly set out to make an old-fashioned Western, but he couldn't help bringing a hip, self-conscious attitude to the proceedings. Silverado thus finds its own funky tone--sometimes rousing, sometimes winking. Four cowpokes converge on a little Western burg called Silverado; they're played by Kevin Kline (a distinctly modern kind of Western hero), Scott Glenn, Danny Glover, and the rowdy young Kevin Costner. Kasdan peppers the somewhat generic action with smart dialogue and a parade of quirky supporting players, including John Cleese as a sheriff who seems to have stepped straight from a Monty Python sketch into an Old West saloon. Bruce Broughton supplies the music, a real throwback to the glory days of thundering Western themes. One thing's for sure: Silverado's a lot more fun than the later Kasdan-Costner Western, Wyatt Earp.
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Witness (Special Collector's Edition) (1985)
Starring: Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis Director: Peter Weir
When Samuel (Lukas Haas), a young Amish boy traveling with his mother Rachel (Kelly McGillis), witnesses the murder of a police officer in a public restroom, he and his mother become the temporary wards of John Book (Harrison Ford), a detective who's been assigned to solve the crime. After suspect lineups and mug-shot books yield nothing, Samuel, in the most memorable scene of the film, recognizes the murderer as a narcotics agent whose picture he sees in the precinct. Once Book realizes that the police chief is in on it, too, he whisks Samuel and Rachel back home to Amish country, where he himself goes into hiding as a plain Amish man. The juxtaposition between the life of the Amish and the violence of inner-city police corruption work surprisingly well for the story, and Kelly McGillis as the falling in love widow gives an almost perfect performance. Directed by Peter Weir, the film is extremely successful in drawing the viewer into its world and, accordingly, is immensely entertaining. The only thing that mars its polish is the one-dimensional, almost cartoonish handling of the upper-echelon police corruption--a subtler, more realistic treatment of this aspect of the story would have rendered the film near perfect.
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The Color Purple (1985)
Starring: Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg Director: Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg, proving he's one of the few modern filmmakers who has the visual fluency to be capable of making a great silent film, took a melodramatic, D.W. Griffith-inspired approach to filming Alice Walker's novel. His tactics made the film controversial, but also a popular hit. You can argue with the appropriateness of Spielberg's decision, but his astonishing facility with images is undeniable--from the exhilarating and eye-popping opening shots of children playing in paradisiacal purple fields to the way he conveys the brutality of a rape by showing hanging leather belts banging against the head of the shaking bed. In a way it's a shame that Whoopi Goldberg, a stage monologist who made her screen debut in this movie, went on to become so famous, because it was, in part, her unfamiliarity that made her understated performance as Celie so effective. (This may be the first and last time that the adjective understated can be applied to Goldberg.) Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including best picture and actress (supporting players Oprah Winfrey and Margaret Avery were also nominated), it was quite a scandal--and a crushing blow to Spielberg--when it won none. The digital video disc requires flipping to play the whole movie.
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Lethal Weapon - The Complete Series (1987, 89, 92, 98)
Starring: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover Director: Richard Donner
The explosive and edgy Lethal Weapon introduced America to its favorite modern buddy team: Mel Gibson's suicidal firecracker Martin Riggs, a Vietnam vet whose reckless stunts earn him a reputation as the Los Angeles Police Department's least desirable partner, and Danny Glover's aging family man Roger Murtaugh, a veteran detective who wants nothing more than to gracefully live to see his pension. Richard Donner's smash movie is sleek, stylish, and practically nonstop action, but it's the chemistry between the combustible energy of Gibson and the paternal reserve of Glover that makes this combination so lethal. A sequel was inevitable, so Lethal Weapon 2 sent Riggs and Murtaugh after a South African drug syndicate, tossed funnyman Joe Pesci into the mix as a comic foil, and upped the ante of explosions, car chases, and apocalyptic property damage. Kung fu-kicking Rene Russo signed on for Lethal Weapon 3, a "mad genius run amok" adventure rushed into production without a finished script (and it shows in sloppy ad-libbed scenes) and crammed with wild high-speed chases and spectacular explosions. When Lethal Weapon 4 hit screens in 1998, the starring cast had ballooned: hot comic Chris Rock joined Gibson, Glover, Russo, and Pesci to take on a Chinese counterfeiting and slavery ring led by Hong Kong martial arts superstar Jet Li. Director Richard Donner helms every installment of his series, topping the frenzy of action and pyrotechnics with each new feature; watching the arc of the Lethal Weapon franchise is like a crash course in American action cinema of the '90s: bigger, faster, louder. Yet at the heart of every film is Riggs and Murtaugh, mismatched partners who become unlikely buddies, ready to lay their lives down for one another. By the climax of Lethal Weapon 4, as they team up against the fighting fury of Jet Li, their friendship has become the defining drive of the series.
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A Raisin in the Sun (1989)
Starring: Starletta DuPois, Lou Ferguson Director: Bill Duke
This is absolutely the best version of this play ever.....Not to take anything away from the Sidney P. version, but it had too many cuts and added scenes and lost alot of what Lorraine Hansberry was really saying...Danny Glover's Walter Lee is stellar and far more compelling that Sidney's...Its just and all around master piece
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To Sleep with Anger (1990)
Starring: Paul Butler, DeVaughn Nixon Director: Charles Burnett
Danny Glover plays the mysterious Harry Mention, a charming trickster who invades the life of a family and who claims to have (and may very well have) a connection to dark powers. In any case, his presence sows dissent among a patriarch (Paul Butler) and his offspring, the latter more interested in the legacy of mystical wisdom Harry may represent. Based on stories of superstition he heard in youth, writer-director Charles Burnett's film is a fine and funny accomplishment that intersects dream time and linear time, and it has the heart of a folk tale. Glover and Butler are very good, their characters locked in knowing rivalry.
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Predator 2 (Special Edition) (1990)
Starring: Kevin Peter Hall, Danny Glover Director: Stephen Hopkins
Predator wreaked havoc in the jungle and struck box-office gold, so Hollywood logic dictated that Predator 2 should raise hell in the big, bad city. Los Angeles, to be specific, and this near-future L.A. (circa 1997) is an ultra-violent playground for the invisibility-cloaked alien that hunted Arnold Schwarzenegger in the previous film. Scant explanation is given for the creature's return, and because Ah-nuld was busy making Total Recall, Danny Glover was awkwardly installed as the maverick cop (is there any other kind?) who defies a government goon (Gary Busey) to curtail the alien's inner-city killing spree. But why bother, when the victims are scummy Colombian drug lords? Don't look for intelligent answers; director Stephen Hopkins favors wall-to-wall action over sensible plotting, allowing Stan Winston's more prominently featured Predator to join the ranks of iconic movie monsters. And anticipating Alien vs. Predator in comic books and in theaters, there's a familiar-looking skull in the Predator's trophy case!
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Grand Canyon (1992)
Starring: Danny Glover, Kevin Kline Director: Lawrence Kasdan
This murky rumination on keeping faith in our troubled times was an early sign that writer-director Lawrence Kasdan (Silverado) was losing his once-powerful grasp on the art of storytelling. Set in modern Los Angeles--with all its random violence, venality, ubiquitous police presence, earthquakes, and dreams--the film concerns an unusual intersection of lives and chance occurrences that alter everyone's perspective on destiny. Kasdan, very understandably, is attempting to create an experience for viewers as intuitive as the undefined forces propelling his characters. But from the outside looking in, there isn't enough internal logic in the story to help us connect the dots. Steve Martin has an interesting part as a garish film producer who undergoes a change in priorities after being assaulted on the street.
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- Pure Luck (1991)
- Queen (1993) (TV miniseries)
- The Saint of Fort Washington (1993)
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Maverick (1994)
Starring: Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster Director: Richard Donner
Inspired by the 1960s TV series that starred James Garner in the title role, this lightweight Western from 1994 proved to be a surprising box-office hit. Well, maybe not such a big surprise, since it's from the star and director of the Lethal Weapon movies, and operates with a similar combination of mainstream plotting and easygoing humor. Mel Gibson stars as card-playing gunslinger Brett Maverick, who meets up with wily gambler Annabelle Bransford (Jodie Foster) and a marshal named Zane Cooper (James Garner, trading his old role to Gibson) on his way to the World Series of poker in St. Louis. Maverick's trying to raise the $5,000 needed to join the high-stakes contest, but that's easier said than done due to a lot of unscrupulous competition and a twisting plot of tricks and deceptions. It's all played for laughs and action, so the movie never wears out its welcome, despite a running time that could've used a good trimming. It's also fun to see the rapport between Gibson and Garner, as if the present and former Mavericks were a kind of surrogate son and father, bonded by their mutual skill in charming and conning their way through tight spots. Director Richard Donner also pays tribute to old Westerns by casting veterans of the genre in cameo roles (including Bert Remsen, Dub Taylor, and Denver Pyle), and Gibson's Lethal Weapon costar Danny Glover pops in for a surprise appearance. None of this really adds up to much since the movie makes no pretense about taking itself seriously, but that's precisely why audiences found it so entertaining.
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Angels in the Outfield (1994)
Starring: Danny Glover, Brenda Fricker Director: William Dear
This effects-heavy, 1994 remake of the 1951 film starring Janet Leigh and Keenan Wynn is all computer-generated pizzazz, with none of the charm or imagination of the original. Aimed squarely at children this time, the story focuses on a boy who gets some divine intervention on behalf of his favorite ball club. Christopher Lloyd plays the head angel, and Danny Glover is good as the team's manager, but the real star of the film--for better or worse--is the software that makes a glowing, celestial presence on the field seem real.
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Operation Dumbo Drop (1995)
Starring: Danny Glover, Ray Liotta Director: Simon Wincer
During the Vietnam War, a village that American forces are using to spy on the Ho Chi Minh Trail has its sacred elephant killed by the North Vietnamese Army because they were cooperating with the Americans. The villagers need an elephant for a ceremony that will occur within the week. Captain Sam Cahill, an easygoing man who is heading home, and his hotheaded replacement Captain TC Doyle scrounge up another elephant with the help of sneaky supply chief warrant officer David Poole, luckless farmboy Lawrence Farley, and short-timer Harvey Ashford, and transport it across South Vietnam to get it to the village on time, running into all sorts of transport problems, personality conflicts, and an NVA squad that wants the Americans out of the village.
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- Fallen Angels: Red Wind (1995)
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The Rainmaker (1997)
Starring: Matt Damon, Danny DeVito Director: Francis Ford Coppola
When viewed from a cranky perspective, this by-the-book David vs. Goliath story doesn't offer any surprises, and it's a bit sad to watch director Francis Coppola (who also adapted John Grisham's bestseller) squandering his once-glorious talent on such conventional Hollywood fare. In a more charitable light, however, there's great pleasure to be found in Coppola's intelligent, no-nonsense handling of a plot that's every bit as involving as it is formulaic. Coppola also knows how to bring out the best in a stellar cast, and this is the movie (released in November 1997, just a few weeks before Good Will Hunting) that signaled Matt Damon's arrival as a major-league star. Damon plays Rudy Baylor, a young rookie lawyer in Memphis (location of many Grisham stories) who takes on a powerful insurance company (led by a sharklike lawyer played by Jon Voight) by representing the family of a boy who was denied potentially life-saving treatment for leukemia. Rudy also comes to the rescue of an abused wife (Claire Danes) and learns the tricks of the legal trade from a seasoned paralegal (Danny DeVito), who sees Rudy as his ticket out of the sleazeball practice run by a shady lawyer (Mickey Rourke). There's no mystery about where this plot is going, but Coppola takes us there in high style with a sharp script, and Damon strikes just the right note of naivete and strategic intelligence. When Goliath inevitably falls, this courtroom David wins fair and square.
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The Prince of Egypt (1998)
Starring: Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes Director: Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner
Nearly every biblical film is ambitious, creating pictures to go with some of the most famous and sacred stories in the Western world. DreamWorks' first animated film was the vision of executive producer Jeffrey Katzenberg after his ugly split from Disney, where he had been acknowledged as a key architect in that studio's rebirth (The Little Mermaid, etc.). His first film for the company he helped create was a huge, challenging project without a single toy or merchandising tie-in, the backbone du jour of family entertainment in the 1990s.
Three directors and 16 writers succeed in carrying out much of Katzenberg's vision. The linear story of Moses is crisply told, and the look of the film is stunning; indeed, no animated film has looked so ready to be placed in the Louvre since Fantasia. Here is an Egypt alive with energetic bustle and pristine buildings. Born a slave and set adrift in the river, Moses (voiced by Val Kilmer) is raised as the son of Pharaoh Seti (Patrick Stewart) and is a fitting rival for his stepbrother Rameses (Ralph Fiennes). When he learns of his roots--in a knockout sequence in which hieroglyphics come alive--he flees to the desert, where he finds his roots and heeds God's calling to free the slaves from Egypt.
Katzenberg and his artists are careful to tread lightly on religious boundaries. The film stops at the parting of the Red Sea, only showing the Ten Commandments--without commentary--as the film's coda. Music is a big part (there were three CDs released) and Hans Zimmer's score and Stephen Schwartz's songs work well--in fact the pop-ready, Oscar-winning "When You Believe" is one of the weakest songs. Kids ages 5 and up should be able to handle the referenced violence; the film doesn't shy away from what Egyptians did to their slaves. Perhaps Katzenberg could have aimed lower and made a more successful animated film, but then again, what's a heaven for?
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Beloved (1998)
Starring: Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover Director: Jonathan Demme
This layered film, a labor of love from director Jonathan Demme and star Oprah Winfrey, covers a lot of turf in its nearly three-hour running time. Part slavery fable, part mother-daughter tale, part ghost story, Beloved demands an audience's full attention from its dramatic, slightly bewildering opening, when a family dog comes down on the wrong side of some angry, unseen force. But Demme and his talented cast provide an unforgettable payoff for those who surrender.
The film traces the life of Sethe (played in her middle years by Winfrey), a former slave who has rebuilt what seems to be a peaceful, productive life in Ohio. Yet through chilling, sparing use of flashback, Demme slowly unveils, as does the Toni Morrison masterpiece on which the film is based, the horrors of Sethe's former life, and the terrible event that led to the haunting of Sethe's home.
While the horrors of slavery and the bloody event in Sethe's family leave undeniable impressions, the film's brilliance is also evidenced in smaller, equally satisfying ways. Rachel Portman's spiritual-influenced score is as uplifting as it is haunting, and the glimpses of the post-slavery African American world--as with a simple family outing to a local carnival, or a ladies' sewing-and-gospel circle--make this a treat for the intellect as well as the heart. The members of the cast, especially Kimberly Elise as Sethe's struggling daughter and Thandie Newton as the mysterious title character, are supremely affecting.
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Antz (1998)
Starring: Woody Allen, Dan Aykroyd Director: Eric Darnell, Tim Johnson
Woody Allen as a worker ant with an inferiority complex? Sylvester Stallone as an affable soldier ant who discovers that digging tunnels is cool? The animation playground we all knew so well is turning into a theme park full of in-jokes for grownups. Antz explores age-old topics (one person--err, insect--can make a difference, individuality and social responsibility must exist side by side, war is hell) with comic asides and Woody Allen's funniest quips this side of PG (adults will chuckle at the socialist slogans bandied about as he campaigns for workers' rights). Sharon Stone voices the rebellious princess with a fun-loving streak that doesn't quite overcome her royal bearing and court training, but she can learn. Gene Hackman is all teeth (ants have teeth?) and menacing grins as the Army general plotting insect-icide. This bug's-eye view of life on Earth gives Allen's neurotic nonconformist an epic adventure of microscopic proportions: a devastating war with a termite colony, an odyssey to the fabled land of plenty (a picnic ground), and a race to save his fellow workers from certain death. Other voices include Anne Bancroft as the Queen, Christopher Walken, Jennifer Lopez, Danny Glover, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, and John Mahoney. The computer animation isn't exactly realistic but feels as solid and contoured as puppet animation with the smoothness and slickness of traditional cel cartoons, and the character designs and animation offer a marvelous range of expressions. The PG rating includes a gritty battle sequence that may frighten youngsters.
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Boesman & Lena (2000)
Starring: Danny Glover, Angela Bassett Director: John Berry
Written at a time when protest against apartheid in South Africa was routinely crushed, this play by the great Athol Fugard brings the sensibility of Beckett's Waiting for Godot to the horrors of life as a nonperson in a racially exclusive state. Two ragged wanderers--the bearish Boesman (Danny Glover) and the wilier Lena (Angela Bassett)--meet on a riverbank, where they try to scavenge food and firewood in order to survive the night. As they talk, their bitterness about the ways their lives have gone begins to come out, as well as the tragedies they've suffered at the hands of a racist government. Gradually, you realize that they've been husband and wife in a relationship that has been plundered by the poisonous influence of apartheid, reducing them to a level in which they have to remind themselves of their own humanity and their ability to make human connections. Director John Berry has opened it up somewhat, including flashbacks of the violence that has sundered their lives. It's grim, tough stuff, marked by extraordinary performances by Glover and Bassett.
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The Royal Tenenbaums (The Criterion Collection) (2001)
Starring: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston Director: Wes Anderson
In a fitting follow-up to Rushmore, writer-director Wes Anderson and cowriter-actor Owen Wilson have crafted another comedic masterwork that ripples with inventive, richly emotional substance. Because of the all-star cast, hilarious dialogue, and oddball characters existing in their own, wholly original universe, it's easy to miss the depth and complexity of Anderson's brand of comedy. Here, it revolves around Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), the errant patriarch of a dysfunctional family of geniuses, including precocious playwright Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), boyish financier and grieving widower Chas (Ben Stiller), and has-been tennis pro Richie (Luke Wilson). All were raised with supportive detachment by mother Etheline (Anjelica Huston), and all ache profoundly for a togetherness they never really had. The Tenenbaums reconcile somehow, but only after Anderson and Wilson (who costars as a loopy literary celebrity) put them through a compassionate series of quirky confrontations and rekindled affections. Not for every taste, but this is brilliant work from any perspective.
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The Cookout (Widescreen Edition) (2004)
Starring: Ja Rule, Tim Meadows Director: Lance Rivera
Queen Latifah lends her comic sparkle to The Cookout, a new comedy she also helped conceive. Todd Anderson (Quran Pender) becomes a first draft pick in professional basketball and starts spending like there's no tomorrow; he buys a car, diamonds for his golddigging girlfriend (Meagan Good), and a huge house in a gated community. But though his life has been turned upside down, his family hasn't--and when everyone assembles in his new ritzy neighborhood for a celebratory cook-out, chaos follows. The Cookout is loaded with charismatic performers, such as Jenifer Lewis (Juwanna Mann) as Todd's no-nonsense mother, Eve (Barbershop) as his former best friend, Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon) as a new neighbor, and the aforementioned Latifah (Bringing Down the House) as an over-ambitious security guard. Unfortunately, the underdeveloped script gives them little to do and nowhere to go. Many lessons are learned, but few laughs are had.
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Saw (Uncut Edition) (2004)
Starring: Leigh Whannell, Cary Elwes Director: James Wan R
Saw opens with a gruesome scenario: Two men are chained to the walls of a grimy bathroom with a bloody corpse lying on the floor between them. Tape recordings tell them that one of the men has to kill the other, or his wife and child will die. The corpse is holding a gun in one hand, but it's out of reach...but whoever has locked these two up has thoughtfully provided a hacksaw that can't cut through the heavy chain, but might cut through a little flesh and bone. From there, Saw jumps back and forth as the two men slowly unravel how they know each other and that their tormentor is one of those all-knowing, all-capable serial killers (it goes without saying that Saw is hugely influenced by Seven and the movies of Dario Argento), a fellow known as Jigsaw who disguises his voice and lets a creepy puppet (lifted almost directly from the eccentric animations of the Brothers Quay) be his visual representative. But imitation isn't inherently bad; what puts Saw ahead of its horror compatriots is a gleeful enthusiasm that a dozen sequels to Halloween couldn't muster. Saw has problems--it's clumsily overwritten (every detail of what's going on, no matter how visually evident, will be explained by the characters); most of the situations are static and implausible; and though the cast includes talented veterans like Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride) and Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon), the acting has the depth of a puddle. The rapid pace and frequently frenzied camerawork keep things in motion and while the philosophical underpinnings of Jigsaw won't challenge Hegel or Schopenhauer, they do offer more food for thought than most contemporary horror. Discriminating fans of the genre who like their gore with a glimmer of an idea will embrace Saw.
The Uncut Edition differs only slightly from the theatrical release; it reinserts a little more gore that was cut to get an R rating and tightens up the editing (the uncut version is actually a teensy bit shorter than the theatrical release). The extras are plentiful (if a bit thin): Two audio commentaries (one by director James Wan, screenwriter/actor Leigh Whannel, and Elwes), one by the producers--thankfully, no one takes themselves too seriously. Also included are a trio of typically self-congratulatory making-of featurettes ("He was amazing to work with" etc.), an animated storyboard of a sequence they couldn't afford to shoot, a DVD-ROM game in which you can construct your own puppet, a couple of self-mocking Easter Eggs, and lots of promotional stuff for Saw II. There's a very curious faux-news show purporting to be an investigation of the "real" Jigsaw, which uses clips from the movie as if they were documentary footage--it's hard to say whether this is a misguided attempt to make the movie seem creepier or a bit of flimsy humor. Most fans will find the regular DVD release satisfactory; this special edition is largely for hardcore enthusiasts.
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Earthsea (2004)
Starring: Shawn Ashmore, Kristin Kreuk Director: Robert Lieberman
Originally broadcast as Legend of Earthsea in December 2004, the Sci-Fi Channel's four-hour miniseries of Earthsea rides the coattails of the Lord of the Rings trilogy with its quest-driven story of humble blacksmith Ged (Shawn Ashmore), a wizard-to-be who is mentored by the magical Ogion (Danny Glover) as he seeks to preserve the realm of Earthsea from the evil King Tygath (Sebastian Roche). Ged's adventures lead him to the priestess Tenar (Kristen Kreuk, from Smallville) and with secrets shared by High Priestess Thar (Isabella Rossellini), they gain the power to prevail over Tygath. As presented by Robert Halmi Sr. (producer of Merlin, Gulliver's Travels and several other fantasy miniseries), this skeletal rendering of Earthsea boasts a wealth of digital effects and semi-lavish set design, but Ashmore's lack of charisma hampers a production already fraught with problems. It provoked the wrath of fantasy fans and a firm rejection by author Ursula K. Le Guin, who had watched helplessly (she wasn't involved or consulted) as her classic novels A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan were racially "whitewashed" (in Le Guin's words) nearly beyond recognition. As TV fantasy goes, Earthsea is admirably ambitious, but best enjoyed by those with no awareness of the classic books it is very loosely based on.
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Missing in America (2005)
Starring: Danny Glover, Ron Perlman Director: Gabrielle Savage Dockterman
After I finished viewing this movie for the first time I had to take a few minutes to compose myself. I was so deeply moved by the characters who were vividly represented as the plot progressed. The last few scenes left me reaching for the tissue box again and again. While I originally thought it was going to be yet another predictible vet story, I was extremely pleased and surprised to see that FINALLY the screenwriters of this movie had the sense to through in a few twists. I never could have guessed the twists and turns that unfolded, it is pure brilliance on part of the writers. Light the fire, curl up underneath a warm blanket and clear your night for this movie will bring you to a new place.
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The Shaggy Dog (2006)
Starring: Tim Allen, Kristin Davis Director: Brian Robbins
Tim Allen barks, growls, and slobbers his way through the latest remake of the classic Disney suburban fable The Shaggy Dog. A mystical long-lived dog is kidnapped from Tibet by a nefarious corporation; when it escapes, it bites aspiring District Attorney Dave Douglas (Allen, The Santa Clause, Toy Story), who finds himself regressing into a dog in the courtroom. There's more to the plot--something to do with creating a youth serum from the dog's blood--but let's face it, that's not what anyone's going to see the movie for, and the "bad dad remembers how to love his family" theme is equally perfunctory. This is all about Allen running around like a dog and a cute sheepdog running around trying to do human things, and the movie does a competent job of playing with that scenario. Allen throws himself into doggieness with amusing abandon. Also featuring Kristin Davis (Sex and the City), Spencer Breslin (The Cat in the Hat), Jane Curtin (3rd Rock from the Sun), Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon), and Robert Downey Jr. (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Wonder Boys), who seems to be enjoying himself as a nefarious scientist at the nefarious corporation.
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Biographical Information from Wikipedia
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Epilepsy Resources @ myfoodcount.com
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