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I thought it might be interesting to take a break from reviewing and analysing films to let all of you in on how buying DVDs works in Ghana. Needless to say, every aspect of life here is different – eating, drinking, driving, communicating, everything - so naturally, buying films is a different experience as well. However, I didn’t realise the extent of the difference until I actually went out to buy films. I expected that DVDs, like most things, would be cheaper here than in America. I had been told that I would easily find bootlegged films for sale. What I did not realise was that bootlegged films are all there is to buy. From where I am staying, I can walk for about ten minutes, get in a cab for about ten more minutes, and then get out and walk some more. Once all this is done, I will be in a market, and here there are a couple of carts, completely covered with films. Now, it’s not like you can just go up to them and tell them which movies you want – each disc on the stand has ...

Mitch Hedberg used to tell a joke about comedians who were given roles on TV shows, saying that it was unfair that they had spent all their time working on jokes and now they were expected to do something that was related to their job but not the same. He said, “that's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, ‘OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?’" It’s common for stand up comedians to make their way into acting – Hedberg was on That 70’s Show , George Carlin was in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and a couple Kevin Smith movies, Lewis Black, John Stewart, Richard Pryor, and several others have made the transition. It is a leap to go from telling jokes to acting, but there is a connection. What is even more interesting, I think, is when a singer transitions to acting. Perhaps the best early example of a singer going from the stage to the screen is Frank Sinatra. By the early 1950’s, Sinatra was in decline. The previous decad...

Everybody loves a happy ending right? Well, not always. In this postmodern age sometimes writers like to throw us a curveball and give an unhappy ending. It’s a risky move – we have spent the past couple hours getting to know these characters, seeing them struggle, and if they fail in the end, we will probably be leaving the theatre feeling miserable. In Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo , Cecilia leaves home believing that she will be out of the Great Depression and living in Hollywood with the star that she loves. Unbeknownst to her, she’s been duped, and will be stuck in New York with her abusive husband. We spend three and a half hours rooting against the Romans in Spartacus , only to watch our hero die on a cross. Many other films – Midnight Cowboy, Chinatown, Brazil, The Empire Strikes Back, to name a few, employ unhappy endings. In most cases, I am a fan of the unhappy ending, but sometimes it just feels tacked on. Any writer can tell you that it’s extremely difficult to ...

        During the Third Reich, several actors and filmmakers moved to Hollywood to escape having to make propaganda films for the Third Reich. Fritz Lang, the director of Metropolis and M , two extremely influential early films, came to the US and made a few westerns; Marlene Dietrich, an early sex symbol, renounced her German citizenship and starred in many Hollywood films. Before the War, Hollywood was competing with Germany to make the best films in the world – before sound it didn’t matter what language movies were in, and the first actor to win the Best Actor Oscar was German. Fast forward to the present day, and we see that Hollywood still has an appetite for German talent. Little known fact, some of our favorite movie stars tried to defect to the Nazis.            In 1981, Wolfgang Peterson wrote and directed Das Boot , a film about forty Nazi soldiers on a submarine. Unusual for a Nazi film, we are not supposed to hat...

 The Bible tells us that men, curious to reach heaven and meet God, began construction on a tower tall enough to reach Him. When God saw this tower He realized that humanity had gotten out of His control, and that men were capable of achieving anything. To counteract this, He broke down their means of communication by abolishing their universal language, thus explaining the diversity in the peoples that populate the world today.         The point of this story of the tower of Babel is that we all think in separate languages, and can only understand each other if we share a common language. Language is a interesting issue in films – should you watch a foreign movie with subtitles, or overdubbed with English voices? Should a director have their characters all speaking in English, possibly with an accent that identifies their country? In the James Bond film From Russia with Love all the characters speak English, despite the fact that the villains are Russian a...