Howlings

By Mark Howell

Based on his lifetime achievement, Key West’s most respected film critic, Shirrel Rhoades, has won the 2014 Professional of the Year Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

 

 

He will receive it at a presentation in Montreal in August.

 

 

Our personal top choice among the very best films we viewed at home via Netflix over the past year is a 2012 movie called “Silver Linings Playbook.”

 

 

Somehow we’d previously overlooked this amazing film that manages to turn extreme bipolar disorder into the highest comedy and then, literally, into a dance of deepest love.

 

 

“Silver Linings Playbook” actually received eight Academy Award nominations and became the first film since Warren Beatty‘s “Reds” to be nominated for the four acting Oscars and the first since 2004 to be nominated for the Big Five Oscars.

 

 

Written and directed by David O. Russell, it stars Jennifer Lawrence, who won the award for best actress, with Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro.

 

 

A blockbuster at the box office, it grossed more than $236 million worldwide.

 

 

If you, too, somehow missed this miracle of a movie on its first time around, rent it now by all means. To our blown mind, “Silver Linings Playbook.” extends the limits of the possible.

 

 

One of the most galling? telling? obits of the past year just past has to be that for Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese general who successfully drove the French and the Americans from his homeland and three months ago died at the ripe old age of 102.

 

 

When Richard Nixon attempted to recruit the CIA to stifle the Watergate investigation, he instructed his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to tell CIA Director Richard Helms that the president was concerned that the Watergate investigation might open up “the whole Bay of Pigs thing.”

 

 

In his memoir “The Ends of Power,” Haldeman mentions several Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs and later writes, “It seems that in all of those references, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination.”

 

 

One of the masterminds behind the Watergate break-in was White House counsel and long-time CIA master spy E. Howard Hunt, who on his deathbed insisted that Lyndon Johnson organized the assassination and that several CIA officers implemented it.

 

 

A lesser-known but equally important confession was made by Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, which has been disclosed by New York detective Jim Rothstein who, in 1977, had arrested Sturgis for threatening a woman named Marita Lorentz, once been Fidel Castro’s lover. Sturgis met Marita in 1959 and recruited her into a failed mission to kill Castro, whom she hated for forcing her to abort the child he’d fathered.

 

 

Marita had on several occasions visited the anti-Castro camp on No Name Key in the Florida Keys, claiming she’d seen Lee Harvey Oswald at the camp — a sighting that was later disputed.

 

 

She also told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that she’d been in a car caravan just before the assassination that traveled from Miami to Dallas. She said that Sturgis was the leader of a caravan that included several Cuban exiles plus the late Gerry Hemming, leader of the camp at No Name Key and well known by investigators into Keys connections to the Kennedy assassination. She said that when the caravan arrived in Dallas, they received cash from Nixon’s counsel Howard Hunt.

 

 

Quote for the Week:

 

 

“Love builds up the broken wall

 

 

and straightens the crooked path.

 

 

Love keeps the stars in the firmament

 

 

and imposes rhythm on the ocean tides.

 

 

Each of us is created of it

 

 

and I suspect

 

 

each of us was created for it.”

 

 

                  — Maya Angelou

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