MyLibraryDV now available

HCPL has a new service for your viewing pleasure: MyLibraryDV, offering viewers digital downloadable videos on demand. Click on the link above or go to "Library Services, Branches, & Jobs" on the HCPL homepage and then click on "MyLibraryDV" right in the center of the page.

Using MyLibraryDV is easy. First, users need to download an application on their home computers in order to view the DVs. Once it is downloaded, users will then have access to a selection of classic, independent, and foreign films, as well as an impressive variety of instructional, travel, health and fitness, and other useful and entertaining videos, all viewable on home computers. MyLibraryDV includes kids' programs as well.

The video entertainment selection includes Academy Award winners and other classic films. Some of the entertainment videos include William Castle's campy horror film House on Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price, Frank Capra's last "social statement" film Meet John Doe, and the Italian Neo-Realist classic, Roberto Rossellini's Open City. The foreign film collection goes beyond Open City, to include films on video from China, Finland, Spain, Russia, and many other lands.

Check it out...or more accurately, click on it, and watch videos on demand from your library, right in your home, through MyLibraryDV.

Garifuna Women's Project

The Garifuna people live on the coast of Central America, descendents of survivors of an African slave shipwreck and Carib and Arawak Indians. Their language is unique as is their culture, and both are fading as the Garifuna mingle and mix with surrounding cultures. Now, HCPL has available a CD of the Garifuna, Umalali, full of song and story that might just mesmerize the listener. With a mixture of blues, rock, African, Caribbean, and Latin, the female vocalists present their music, with melodies that swirl and dance and give voice to the stories of the women who have endured the poverty and the sorrows of their everyday lives.

Hitchcock Film Festival

On February 24th, the Bel Air Art Commission presents the Hitchcock Film Festival at the Bel Air Armory. Two Hitchcock films will be shown... at 1 p.m. Rear Window and at 3:30 Strangers on a Train. Popcorn and refreshments will be available. Go watch a movie and get ready for the Oscars, which air the night of February 24th.

And the Oscar nominees are...

The Oscar nominations were just announced this morning! Two movies, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, led the nominations garnering eight each. The following movies were nominated for Best Picture of the year: Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood. The Oscars are February 24th! Do you think they will go on with the writers' strike still going on? I missed watching the Golden Globes, and will definitely miss the Oscars if they are not on. Will you miss seeing the awards too?

Movie violence...

There has been a recent study saying that 'violent movies may actually reduce violence'. Read the article and see if you agree. I have never seen the movie Saw or the three sequels, but they are extremely popular movies.

Review of "Talk to Her" (2003)

Alan’s Picks: A Review of “Talk to Her” (2003)
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Almodóvar, born in 1949, is widely considered to be the premier Spanish filmmaker of his generation. His movies, though, are anything but typical Hollywood fare. “Talk to Her” follows two highly unusual couples: the first is a travel journalist and a woman bullfighter who has just left her former lover, himself a famous torero. The second consists of a male nurse who lovingly tends a beautiful dancer who has been in a coma for years; these two have never met, but the nurse had secretly watched her, before her accident, for months through the plate-glass window of a dance studio from his nearby apartment. When the bullfighter is seriously injured and placed in a hospital, also in a coma, the two stories come together. The journalist has little hope that the bullfighter will ever regain consciousness, but the nurse insists that both comatose women can eventually be revived through their continual attention. For the nurse, that attention includes constantly talking to the dancer’s beautiful but immobile form, intimately stroking and massaging her in ways that make the viewer wonder where the line is between tenderness and perversity, and even cleaning up the mess of her monthly menstrual cycle. In the end, the audience is forced to address possibly unresolvable questions about love, illness, friendship, loss, and loneliness. Are we any better than the nurse as we ourselves feel drawn to the dancer’s beautiful body? Are there limits to what is acceptable in the name of friendship, tenderness—even love? “Talk to Her” is disturbing, beautiful in its slow pacing and emphasis on visual imagery, well acted, and quite well written (the screenplay won an award). And it is an excellent example of the intelligent, high-art film making still being produced throughout the world today—something that we may well disbelieve as we contemplate the choices available to us at the local centiplex.

--Alan Zuckerman

And the nominees are....

The Golden Globe nominations were announced this morning. The movie Atonement starring Keira Knightley led the nominations with seven. In the Best Motion Picture category, the nominees are... American Gangster, Atonement, Eastern Promises, The Great Debaters, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood. I have only seen one of the nominated movies. Do you have a favorite among the nominees??