Eva only saw the starred movies on Herman’s list. Hence the scant commentary

1. Pearl Harbor
2. Divided We Fall Set in Czechoslovakia during WWII.
3. *Songcatcher Dir. Maggie Greenwald. w/ Janet McTeer. We loved this movie, and so did all the people I spoke to about it. Yet it got some downright negative reviews! In 1908 musicologist Dr. Lily Penleric, in a funk about being passed over for promotion, visits her sister, a schoolteacher in Appalacia. Lily becomes fascinated with folk music.
4. Castaway w/ Tom Hanks.
5. Thirteen Days About the Cuban Missile Crisis.
6. *The Accompanist VCR. Dir. Claude Miller. (Fr). w/ Richard Bohringer (Charles Brice), Romane Bohringer (Sophie), & Elena Safanova (Irene Brice). At the film’s start in occupied Paris the beautiful concert singer Irene hires 20 year old Sohie as her accompanist. Sophie eventually moves in with her employers, though her mother says they are collaborators. The trio moves to London. Sophie observes feelings and has feelings.
7. *The Sorrow and the Pity (Fr).Dir. Marcel Ophuls. 1971. Documentary about Vichy France, with interviews with people who were there. A landmark documentary, in two feature-length parts, homaged in Annie Hall
8. The Limey Drama about an English gangster who comes to the U.S. to investigate his daughter’s death.
9. Hiroshima
10. *Greenfingers About a liberal prison in England with a work-release program. Starring Clive Owen as Colin Briggs, Hellen Mirren as a famous gardening authority and David Kelly as Fergus, Colin’s cellmate.

********** Movies Eva honors with mention.. Order not significant **********

• Nora. (Ireland) Dir. Pat Murphy and Producer James Flynn answered questions afterwards at the Harvard Film Archive. Based loosely on a segment of Brenda Maddox’s biography of Nora Barnacle covering 1904, when she met James Joyce, to 1914, when Dubliners was published. Pat Murphy bought rights to the whole book. I wouldn’t mind seeing her make a feature of another segment of Nora’s life. The movie was a pleasure. The people looked terrific. I like stories about long-term relationships. Expatriates in Trieste. Young parenthood. The writing life. Nora’s influence.
• Pollock Directed by and starring Ed Harris. Amy Madigan (Aquinas ‘68) as Peggy Guggenheim. Marcia Gay Harden as Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife, and a painter in her own right. I liked the period piece aspect--’40’s & ‘50’s (You know you’re getting up there when decades you lived in are the stuff of period dramas). Except for his lucking out in getting Krasner, Pollock’s personal life was a mess.
• Woody Allen Wild Man Blues Documentary directed by Barbara Kopple. In which Woody tours Europe as the clarinetist in a New Orleans style jazz band, accompanied by his sister and Soon Yi Previn. They stayed in some palatial hotels. "If the ceilings were a little higher it’d be perfect," says Woody of one of them. At the end of the movie, back in NYC, the trio has lunch with Woody’s parents. His mother recalls him taking tap dancing lessons but he "never stuck to anything." His nonagenarian father also takes him down a peg.
• Lifestyles of the Poor and Unknown documentary by Nancy Fliesler, 47 min. MFA. About a developmentally disabled married couple, Kris and Marni Jamieson, who live and work in NYC. Marni is the director’s sister. Raises questions about what "intelligence" is. Interesting that job-training programs are funded, but not jobs. Director present. Too bad I missed the screening with the subjects present.
• New York in the Fifties. Documentary by Betsy Blankenbaker based on the book by Dan Wakefield. Seen at the MFA w/ Geo. Keilbach. A very appropriate movie the Saturday after 9-11. Dan reminisces about his education at Columbia, interspersed with footage of Norman Mailer, Joan Didion... 50’s clips &/or current interviews with Gay Talese, Nan Talese, Calvin Trillin, Jane Wylie Genth, Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Norman Podhoretz, Wm. F. Buckley Jr., Mark Van Doren, and, unforgettably, Norman Mailer. The Phoenix said Dan Wakefield’s "mild-mannered gently rueful voice both unifies and puts a nostalgic stamp on the film,"
• Split the Difference. Writer/Dir. Kelly Yoho. Sound Engineer Ezra Cooper. 60 Minute Video. Well cast. I felt like a fly on the wall in what could have been a real encounter--a weekend with two birth brothers meeting for the first time, and their wives.
• Waking Life Dir. Richard Linklater. Filmed with real actors and then digitally processed and painted over--a technique I had not seen before and hope to see again. None of this was in the service of character development or plot, though. The device to hang all this together was that it was a dream. This let the editor off the hook for even providing transitions from one scene to the next. The 97-minute movie would have made about 25 prize-winning caliber shorts.