Another Movie Guide

The television show Dancing with the Stars is about to start their seventh season. There is a lot of talk about the fact that the women celebrities have only won two of the six seasons and there is speculation that the judges are harder on the female celebrities that of their male counterparts. Let us explore that allegation a bit.

First of all, to take a look at advantages on the show let us look at the winners of the six seasons that have already aired.

Winners of Dancing With the Stars Seasons 1-6:

• Season 1 (Summer 2005) Kelly Monaco and Alec Mazo were the winners
• Season 2 (Spring 2006) Drew Lachey and Cheryl Burke were the winners
• Season 3 (Fall 2006) Emmitt Smith and Cheryl Burke were the winners
• Season 4 (Spring 2007) Apolo Anton Ohno and Julianne Hough were the winners
• Season 5 (Fall 2007) Helio Castroneves and Julianne Hough were the winners
• Season 6 (Spring 2008) Kristi Yamaguchi and Mark Ballas were the winners
• Season 7 airs Fall of 2008.

As you can see, the first and the sixth seasons the female celebrities were the winners. Another interesting fact from the above list, each time the female professional dancer won, it was two consecutive seasons. However, when the male professional dancers won, they won once. It is almost as though once the public and the judges take a liking to a particular female professional dancer, they stick with it for two seasons at a time.

Some people have speculated as to why the men are winning more seasons then the woman at a fact that the men are stronger and therefore more able to take on the physical demands of learning the dances. There may be some merit to these allegations as both women that were the final winners of their seasons are very athletic by nature. Kristi Yamaguchi is a professional figure skater and Kelly Monaco is a v (more…)

Eisenstein and Vertov, despite technical and intellectual brilliance, have never been able to force their way into the upper pantheon of my personal canon of great filmmakers: names like Bergman, Kurosawa and Forman hold pride-of-place; names like Tsai, Egoyan and Wong wait patiently by the door, hoping that with time they will be allowed in. But what do these filmmakers have that the Soviet giants do not? Humanity, or more correctly, they don’t portray humanity, or at least, they don’t portray it in the personal and intimate way that gets my juices flowing. Theirs is a world of impersonal concepts; mine is a world of humanism. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1969), holds more in common with Ingmar Bergman’s middle-ages-set films than with the films of his Soviet forebears.

Ostensibly the film is about the monk and religious icon painter, Andrei Rublev (Anatoli Solonitsyn), whom we follow through eight chapters of his life in 15th century Russia, in some of which he only figures peripherally. But, I think, the real subject is the relationship between art, faith and life, and the way that they jostle for prominence in our lives. Life in medieval Russia is hard: famine, plague and violent power struggles leave a path strewn with death and destruction. Faith in God, faith in one’s fellow man, faith in one’s artistic calling; all of these things are constantly tested. Jesters are beaten and tortured, pagans are persecuted by Christians, Christians are abused by pagans, massacres occur in churches. People need to believe in a higher power.

Visually, the film utterly stunning. Vadim Yusov’s sumptuous Sovscope black and white photography beautifully captures the contrast between the ordered, spotless and decorative world of churches and cathedrals, and their gritty and earthy surroundings. The roaming, inquisitive camera almo (more…)