[Updated below.] An adventure-vacationer has drawn Internet notice with his first-person account of surviving a shark attack while spear fishing in the Exuma Cays, a district of the Bahamas. Surviving to tell the story obliges me to do so José Mollá's New Age musings about the greater meaning of the episode conclude with this: Seeing a fin in the water is not nearly as alarming as not seeing that we spend our lives worrying about what’s irrelevant. I’m convinced that the shark didn’t come to take a piece of me but instead to leave me with something. A kind of wisdom that I...

07 November, 2010

One of the nice discoveries in my role as manager and chief film-picker for the Cape Breton Island Film Series has been the movies of Ramin Bahrani, the Iranian-American director of dramas like Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, and Goodbye Solo. Bahrani portrays the extraordinary lives of ordinary people in a naturalistic style that is almost documentary in character. We were the only film series in Canada to show Chop Shop; by the time Goodbye Solo came out a year later, Bahrani's movies were de rigueur on the indie circuit. Bahrani grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Roger Ebert calls him...

21 March, 2010