Movie ofthe Month: Part 29I recentlyreviewedthe follow-ing DVDfor Video Librarian, and thought the results were worth sharing.Little Red Riding Hood and Other Stories [***](David Kaplan, 1992-1997, US, 12+ mins.)Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness ofabandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapplewith their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and inter-pret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get agreater sense of meaning and purpose. Bettelheim thought that by en-gaging with these socially-evolved stories, children would go throughemotional growth that woul

Read more »

Sassy SingsI named my tiny cat Lola after thegender-bending Kinks classic, but if Ihad to do it all over again, I'd credit"Whatever Lola Wants, " the slinkynumber from 1955's Damn Yankees(Richard Adler and Jerry Ross), be-cause I find her as "irresistible" as thelady in question, the devil's assistant. Whatever the sleek, grey Lola wants--food, water, a rub on thetummy--she gets. It doesn't matter what I'm doing at the time.She looks up at me with those pleading eyes, and I'm a goner. Vaughan and Ray Davies offer but two examples; Lola appears invarious guises throughout entertainment history, like the cabaretentertainer Marlene Dietrich plays in von

Read more »

June ReviewsThese are the reviewsand other pieces I'mworking on this month.Amazon DVDs: Shadow& Lies (with James Franco), Hawthorne - The Complete Second Season [three-disc set], Leverage - The Third Season [four-disc set], and Lifetime's Taken from Me - The Tiffany Rubin Story.Amazon Theatricals: X-Men: First Class (with James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence), Andrew Haigh's Weekend, and Na Hong-Jin's The Yellow Sea.Armchair Commentary: Peter Falk obituary.Still playing (or yet to open): Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Cir-cumstance, The Conspirator, Forks over Knives, The Greatest Mo-vie Ever Sold, I Am, Jane Eyre, Water for Elephan

Read more »