Movie Junction

What has become of John Travolta? As a talented actor, Travolta, has ostensibly torpedoed his own career by undertaking tedious villainous roles in “Broken Arrow,” “Battlefield Earth,” “Swordfish,” and “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3.” In these movies, many critics have rightly described his performances as hammy and monotonous. But in spite of this, his filmography contains a number of dazzling performances, like those in “Pulp Fiction,” “Get Shorty,” “Face/Off,” “Hairspray,” and “Primal Colors.” Nonetheless, Travolta’s critically acclaimed roles are far and few between. Does “From Paris with Love” change anything that Travolta has done before? The answer to this would be a resounding no. James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is a personal aide to the U.S. Ambassador in France, who decides to work for the CIA as a low-level agent. Reece is asked to partner up with a trigger-happy, gun-loving agent, Charlie Wax (John Travolta). Their mission is to find the source of an imminent threat on ...

The opening credits of “Everlasting Moments” (2008) are comprised of close-ups of various parts of a vintage Contessa photo camera: the shutter, the lens, and the focusing mechanism. The tight framing and slow sensual camera movements around the camera body are representative of the director’s adoration of the camera as if it were a lover’s body. The scene bears similarity in technical aspect to Alain Resnais’s masterpiece, “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1959); Resnais employs a unique compositional technique--two lovers wrapped tightly to each other, and we only see geometrical patterns of their bodies and arms while they make love. In the same way, the segments in both the movies lead to a memory discourse. Indeed, moments later, through a narrator, we realize the camera belongs to the film’s main protagonist, Maria. The segment opens up the door to the world of a woman who, against all odds, dared to break free from her melancholy domestic life by perusing photography. Based on a true s...