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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...