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| Movie Reviews | |
It’s Spirit Awards season. As a voter this means I’m cramming on the nominees – watching as many films as I can before the voting deadline in February. Julian Schnabel’s new film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (nominated for best feature, director, screenplay and cinematography) has been on my wanna-see list for awhile. I finally checked it out this weekend. Dear readers, it is stunning. Heartbreaking. Beautiful in every way. For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, it tells the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French magazine editor who wrote a memoir by blinking his eye after suffering a massive stroke and paralysis at age 43. It’s also a film about the redemptive power of art. Director Schnabel – who is a painter – said this interesting thing about Bauby in the Fall 2007 issue of Filmmaker magazine: “It was as if some, I don’t know, God or whoever said: ‘You can be a great artist and have no body or you can be a perfectly healthy and normal but you’ll be an ordinary person: Which one would you like to be?’” Hmm… | |
