lee_eisenberg

One thing about director Alan Parker is that I have never detected a common theme in his movies: "Midnight Express", "Mississippi Burning", "The Commitments" and "Angela's Ashes" all looked at different sorts of things. A real surprise among these was 1987's "Angel Heart". Boy did this have some twists and turns! It might not be Parker's best movie ever, but damned (no pun intended) if he didn't turn out an impressive one here. Mickey Rourke, Robert DeNiro and Lisa Bonet put on great performances, and it might very well haunt you long after the viewing.

Watch for an appearance of blues singer Pinetop Perkins as a musician.

The growing concern about artificial intelligence has inevitably led to movie references, namely "The Terminator". It turns out that a lesser known movie focusing on the topic is Wes Craven's "Deadly Friend". This is basically a riff on "Frankenstein", with a teenage boy implanting a computer chip in his dead girlfriend's brain, turning her into a killing machine. Apparently, the movie went through numerous reshoots and edits before getting released, but the now available uncut version features all sorts of cool scenes (the one involving a basketball is the obvious one).

As for the cast, the only cast members whom I recognized were Kristy Swanson (the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Anne Ramsey (best known as Mama Fratelli in "The Goonies", she also played Danny DeVito's mom in "Throw Momma from the Train").

All in all, this is quite a movie in which to feature a scene from "A Summer Place" (which I thought of as a forerunner to "The Graduate"; personally, I think Sandra Dee deserves both a biopic and a Broadway musical about her).

The Statue of Liberty is commonly known as the ultimate symbol of freedom, having welcomed immigrants to the United States for years. But you might not know everything about it. Ken Burns's documentary "The Statue of Liberty" looks at the structure's creation, as well as musing on the meaning of freedom for different peoples. For example, James Baldwin noted that as a black man in the United States, the idea was a cruel joke to him.

Other than that, it is impressive to see what went into building the statue, and seeing it filmed from different angles. A piece of trivia about it that they didn't mention - but you might have seen in "An American Tail" - is that the statue was originally yellow, but exposure to the elements turned it green over the course of thirty years.

All in all, quite impressive. Another interviewee is a young Alexander Vindman, who was in the news more recently for testifying about the Trump-Ukraine Scandal.

Oh, and the difference between freedom and liberty? Freedom is simply the state of being free, while liberty means freedom with responsibilities.