Adventures in Words

     Hidetoshi Nishijima and Toko Miura in “Drive My Car.”  Bitters End photo via IMDB A red Saab 900 Turbo is a co-star as much as any of the human actors in Japan's powerfully moving “Drive My Car.” It won the Academy Award Sunday for best international feature amid nominations including best picture, best adapted screenplay and best director Ryusuki Hamaguchi. In the film's almost three hour run time, the Saab is in more than half the scenes. Many were shot inside the vehicle, moving in traffic. But a lot were shot from outside, from helicopters, from other vehicles or from the Saab itself, front or rear, mostly on picturesque roadways in and outside Hiroshima. The effect captures mesmerizing tranquility, the opposite of road rage. Driving a car – navigating a pathway through life – is one of the endless metaphors in the script adapted from “Men Without Women,” a short story collection by Haruku Murakami. Hidetoshi Nishijima plays renowned theatrical actor and director Yusak

Best comment on last night's Oscar moment came in a tweet from comedy writer Jena Friedman: "'Love will make you do crazy things' –Will Smith and most people in prison for murder."  I'd rather remember this year's Oscars this way (warning: spoiler alert): https://youtu.be/A0UR1IkJvlg

                    Ansel Elgort and Rene Zegler in “West Side Story.”  20 th   Century Studios photo via IMDB Granted, there’s something very First World even bringing up the subject of movies as the refrain of Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” echoes in your brain and each day's news brings images of unfathomable courage enduring a crazed tyrant's murderous cruelty. But readers of this blog have spent the last several months with me getting ready for moviedom’s big night, Sunday on ABC. It would be a shame to quit now, with the finish line in sight. Unfortunately,  I haven’t quite finished my to-do list where the Oscars are concerned.  Despite several attempts I haven't been able to get past the first 10 minutes of “Dune,” likely winner in many of the tech categories. Big worms are all I remember from reading Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic decades ago, but whenever I try to watch it on a screen at hand, it just feels like a bunch of dark noise. “Licorice Pizza” nev

  Photo by Steve Granitz - ©WireImage.com  IMDB Image courtesy  WireImage.com After an endless stream of bad news from elsewhere, we learned of William Hurt's death Sunday night, a week short of his 72 nd  birthday. The loss of any actor strikes a sad, sentimental note, as the Oscars' In Memoriam segment reminds us each year. They are in the business of creating fantasy but they're so real to us. We feel like we know these people intimately, even though we don't know them at all. We've only seen their shadows, projected from afar on huge screens.  For all their well documented glamorous excesses, their chosen profession also calls for lots of heavy lifting. They act out life, usually its most challenging and messy parts, for the rest of us. In William Hurt's case, I did know him. Sort of. Once. In 2007, he and Claire Danes were honored at the Maui Film Festival. It was my job to interview them for The Maui News.  In those days the festival's opening receptio

  Director Sian Heder (in red dress) joined cast members of “CODA” Troy Kotsur, Daniel Durant, Emilia Jones, Marlee Matlin and Eugenio Derbez at the 28th Screen Actors Guild Awards.  Reuters/Aude Guerrucci photo Explosions rocking Kyiv were half a world away, but they still reverberated in the spaces between the words in a Santa Monica airplane hanger converted into a Hollywood ballroom Sunday night. Producers of the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and several of the artists who would receive them, marked the occasion by lauding the courage and unbreakable spirit of the tough soldiers, the volunteer resistance and the innocent families under merciless attack in Ukraine. While the SAG awards offered moments of glorious escape from the apocalyptic nightmare weighing on us all, the artists also added valuable perspective to the dangerous, heart-rending coverage from the front lines we've been getting on CNN since the shelling began.  It's acting – not performing that other act – that&