— by BEV QUESTAD — Hot Springs is just a normal little town in Arkansas. Jayne’s house perches right on the town highway in a two-story faux antebellum home with porch and rafters from which she can hang her wooden vulture cut-outs. She is famous in town for rescuing an injured vulture[...]
Author Archive
Review: Happening
— by BEV QUESTAD — In college, back in the ’60s, a friend attending school on a complete scholarship got pregnant. She heard of a place she could go to in another state. Friends pooled available cash, someone had a car, and she was back two days later, white, gaunt and weak. It tur[...]
Review: Big vs. Small
— by BEV QUESTAD — The tallest waves in the world are found in Nazaré, Portugal. The biggest wave ever recorded there was 80 feet tall. One of the smallest surfers, at 5-foot-1, is determined to conquer both these mega waves and her own demons. Haunting music with a sitar-like sound lur[...]
Review: Box of Rain
— by BEV QUESTAD — It’s 1985 and Lonnie Frazier is a very pretty high school girl. She goes out in a car with boys she’s known since grade school. Then something goes haywire. This one incident, though a hyper-example, is a core metaphor for the betrayal one can experience in formati[...]
Review: The Will to See
— by BEV QUESTAD — The film begins with a quiet pan of New York City and Central Park while a French voice-over intones, “This is where it all began. I am in New York City to defend the Kurdish cause and I receive a message from a stranger alerting me to the plight of […][...]
Review: I Am Gitmo
— by BEV QUESTAD — This review is the last in a three-part examination of films dealing with the Guantanamo prison situation. It’s a seemingly normal day in Afghanistan. A teacher and his family are in their small home in Kabul. A knock is heard at their door and men take the teacher f[...]
Review: My Little One
— by BEV QUESTAD — From the moment we see 10-year-old Frida, with red and yellow Indian war stripes streaked across her face, screech up in an old, beat-up and perhaps stolen truck, we suspect things aren’t exactly as they should be. We are assured of this assumption after we learn she[...]
Review: Cow
— by BEV QUESTAD — “Cow” takes place on a big, kindly run English farm. There is no narration. We are simply observers of the life of a particular black and white Holstein (I think) cow, number 1129. The film begins with the camera on her face. We have no idea from her calm demeanor [...]
Review: The Contractor
— by BEV QUESTAD — James Foster (formidably played by Chris Pine) is standing at attention, expressionless, while a military board announces that he will receive an honorable discharge with no pension or healthcare. Later, we learn the special forces sergeant has been a heroic combatant [...]
Review: Guantanamo Diary Revisited
— by BEV QUESTAD — This review is the second in a three-part examination of films dealing with the Guantanamo prison situation. Released from Guantanamo Bay detention camp in 2015 for lack of evidence and a negative polygraph after 14 years of imprisonment and torture by the US governmen[...]
Review: The Mauritanian
— by BEV QUESTAD — How long do you keep a prisoner without charge or evidence? How strenuously can you interrogate, encourage, and even torture a prisoner to get a confession? At what point will a person say anything? Two months after planes flew into the World Trade Center Towers, the m[...]
Review: Alice
— by BEV QUESTAD — In a small wooden building lit by candlelight in the dark of the night, two slaves are married quietly and secretly. Their lives are really not their own to determine. The new husband, Joseph, will be sent off the next day, like a stud bull, to impregnate a slave from [...]
Review: Man of God
— by BEV QUESTAD — “I am the leader of the whole world. What would you like me to give you?” This true-life story of Nektarios of Aegin grabs attention from the start and soon spreads into your heart and soul like the incoming crash of a Mediterranean wave. A showing of “Man of God[...]
Review: Drive My Car
— by BEV QUESTAD — Up for an Oscar in two categories, best film and best international feature film in a foreign language, “Drive My Car” was also on Barack Obama’s list of Favorite Movies of 2021. On one level it is an intellectual’s film, with references to Anton Chekov and exi[...]