THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE - Drive Through Movie Review Thursday, 09 February 2017 The Nerdriders, Kristin and Clint, got to see a sneak peek of the new WAG film THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE. Here is their review for your viewing pleasure! Who is your favorite Gotham City bad guy? Spotlight Post + Giveaway: GUARDIAN OF SECRETS (US... Featured Review: A Million Worlds With You by Clau...Suzanne Chambers holds the devotional book she will release at two signings this month in Athens and Watkinsville. Watkinsville resident Suzanne Chambers has for years shared her faith with other women through speeches, Bible studies and an Internet blog, but now she has penned her first book. “Living Letters — Daily Devotions for Busy Women” is a book of daily devotionals designed for a quick, but steady read five days a week for 52 weeks. “I intentionally didn’t do it for seven days because it’s hard to get one in every day,” said the mother of four. “I found a lot of women of faith really want to do a daily devotional and have time in prayer, but you sometimes get overwhelmed by getting the kids up, working and all the other things on your plate,” Chambers said.
“I wanted something that could be good and helpful, but doesn’t take a lot of time.” Chambers will introduce the book at two signings. The opening book signing is at the clothing boutique Epiphany, 294 Washington St., Athens, from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturrday and the second at Walls of Books, 1971 Hog Mountain Road, Watkinsville, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Tuesday. Each of the devotionals are based on Bible verses with suggestions on how to pray. There are scriptures with ideas, she said, on “what does it mean and how can I live that in my life.” Chambers is married to Athens native Paul Chambers, an executive with AT&T, and they have lived in this area for the past 17 years. She grew up in Woodbury, a small town in Meriweather County. “It was a great place to grow up, but it doesn’t have a lot to hold you there,” she said. She met her husband while attending the University of Georgia and working on a degree in English. She followed that with a MBA, then began working in marketing for Chick-fil-A.
“My first job was helping people love Chick-fil-A. It was a great place to work. I felt very fortunate,” she said. She left the job to raise their children and now focuses on mentoring other women with their spiritual lives. “I do spiritual talks to women and I’ve done that in North Carolina and here in Georgia,” she said. The book grew partially out of her blogs, in which she wrote mostly about a mother’s or woman’s view on life, and for years she had a system on how to speak to God through prayer. The blog was also called “Living Letters” and based on her philosophy that “we are all writing letters in the lives of other people.” “For me, my living letters are my children,” she said, “but beyond that, it’s the lives of my friends and women I’ve mentored — that I’ve put some compassion in.” Now with a soon-to-be-released book, Chambers said she hopes to reach others needing a spiritual lift. “Hopefully, I can write a line or two in the lives of other people I’ll never meet,” she said.
The self-published book is also available at Amazon. Telugu with English subtitles) 2 hr 20 min Looking for movie tickets? Enter your location to see which movie theaters are playing Om Namo Venkatesaya near you.Photo by Anne Joyce/Wild Bunch James Gray’s The Immigrant is a historical throwback within a historical throwback. Set on the Lower East Side of New York in 1921 and filmed with the stately leisure of a Dr. Zhivago–era Hollywood epic, The Immigrant at times also recalls an even older performance tradition from the same neighborhood: the Yiddish-language melodrama. Though it isn’t set in a Jewish milieu—only one of the film’s main characters, Joaquin Phoenix’s Bruno Weiss, is explicitly designated as Jewish—The Immigrant’s story, with its themes of innocence defiled, feminine self-sacrifice, and up-by-the-bootstraps struggle, can easily be imagined unfolding onstage in the early 1900s in a theater on the same cramped, bustling streets where this film takes place.
The immigrant of the title is not Bruno Weiss but Ewa Cybulski (Marion Cotillard), a Polish Catholic who, in the movie’s first frames, debarks at Ellis Island with her sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan). Magda is diagnosed with lung disease and shunted off to the infirmary, awaiting possible deportation if her condition doesn’t improve. Ewa, accused by other passengers of being a woman of “low morals” because of an unspecified shipboard incident, is on the verge of being deported herself when she’s rescued by a stranger—Phoenix’s Bruno—who offers her a place to live and a job sewing costumes for his theater. But as Ewa soon learns, the nightly performances at Weiss’ theater are little more than burlesque-style advertisements for his real wares: the women, whom he peddles privately to his less-than-gentlemanly clients. The shy, unworldly, and beatifically gorgeous Ewa is conscripted to play the Statue of Liberty onstage and soon after introduced—gently but firmly—to a life of prostitution by the mercurial, hard-drinking Weiss.
Ewa, who saves up her earnings to pay for her sister’s care, enters into a complex relationship with her employer/exploiter. He’s half in love with her, yet seemingly untroubled by the spectacle of her daily degradation; she openly professes her hatred for him, but can never resist helping him out of a jam. The plot winds up tighter (and creaks a little) when Bruno’s cousin Emil (an uncharacteristically lighthearted Jeremy Renner), a stage magician, takes a job at the theater and begins to fall for Ewa, too. Emil wants to start a new life out west and bring Ewa with him—but Bruno isn’t keen to let go of the woman who’s become both his love object and one of his top moneymakers. Gray (who co-wrote the screenplay with the late Richard Menello, and also wrote and directed Little Odessa, We Own the Night, and Two Lovers) is an expert at creating dense, textured social milieus for his lost-soul characters to move through. One of The Immigrant’s many pleasures is its detailed recreation of working-class life in 1920s New York (including several scenes at Ellis Island which, unlike most cinematic depictions of that great clearinghouse for the huddled masses, were actually filmed on location).
The film’s credits thank New York’s Tenement Museum, whose neighborhood tours involve pristine re-creations of tenement life that The Immigrant sometimes resembles: Even as you marvel at the verisimilitude of the details, you’re aware of the artificiality of the whole construct. I appreciate Gray’s emotional expansiveness and his willingness to let his actors hit the big, arguably conventional notes proper to melodrama: stoic suffering, tender mercy, slow-boiling fraternal rage. Joaquin Phoenix, who’s worked with Gray on several films now, isn’t at his best as the ineffable Bruno Weiss—maybe because the character as written is a little too ineffable. (His motivations and pathologies seem to mutate scene-to-scene as required by the story.) But even Phoenix’s B acting is something to see, and if the hot-tempered Bruno never quite coheres as a character, at least the actor playing him gets the chance to cycle through an impressive range of affects, concluding with an almost feral scene of despair and self-loathing.