By Dave Montalbano
www.AdventuresofCinemaDave.com
Since Roots became a ratings-winner in the winter of 1977, miniseries dominated broadcast television until the assimilation of cable television. Opening tomorrow in local theaters, Bride Flight has the feeling of the miniseries The Thorn Birds. This multilingual epic contains gorgeous cinematography featuring the New Zealand countryside.
The film opens with the death of Frank (Rutger Hauer), whose funeral is attended by three diverse women of Dutch heritage. Bride Flight flashes back to 1953 when these three World War II survivors take a flight that wins a transcontinental race from Europe to New Zealand.
The three women are a diverse bunch. Esther (Anna Drijver) is a Holocaust survivor who masks her Jewish ethnicity. Due to an inconvenient pregnancy, Esther gives her child to the happily married, but barren, Marjorie (Elise Schaap). Marjorie and Esther’s stories intertwine in tragic and humorous ways. The third bride is Ada (Karina Smulders), a woman who develops a crush on young Frank (Waldemar Torenstra), who is establishing a new wine business.
Slow paced with a rambling, but interesting narrative flow, Bride Flight should appeal to the audience weary of Transformers, Cars and Pirates. This film is like reading an engrossing book while sipping red wine under the sunset.
Reading, or the lack of reading, is the fundamental concern of the documentary, Page One: Inside the New York Times. With the rise of computer usage, the New York Times has become known as “the dinosaur media”. Having relied on bloated advertising revenue streams, the major daily newspapers lost sight of it’s circulation figures.
This film documents this monster medium as it steps into the future. It concludes on an optimistic note, but it feels false, as if this is a propaganda puff piece for this once-respected newspaper institution. To director Andrew Rossi and writer Kate Novak’s credit, they do not flinch showing the tearful layoffs of employees who were devoted to their jobs and showing two reporters who misrepresented the stories they were covering.
But while the film shows the feud with the Tribune organization, it ignores the criticism from The Drudge Report and Fox News. In the midst of this, the one journalistic hero to rise from this film is Times columnist David Carr, who. the story centers around.
