Reviews

Made just a couple of years after the mass suicide-murder at Jonestown Guyana in 1978, "Guyana Tragedy" does a fairly good job of depicting the complicated rise and fall of Jim Jones and The People's Temple.

Powers Booth is mesmerizing as he portrays Jones from his younger days as a sincere preacher and civil rights leader until his descent into fraud, adultery,and drug abuse.

Veronica Cartwright is fine as Jones' wife Marceline although there is little explanation as to why she stayed married to man like Jim Jones.In the end, she is shown dispensing poison to other residents of Jonestown.

One problem that I have with the film is the fairly graphic depiction of the mass-suicide."Guyana Tragedy" would have been better without it.

Based on the novel of the same name by Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives film begins when Joanna Eberhart (Katherine Ross) moves with her husband and children from New York City to the small village of Stepford.

Joanna finds that nearly all of the wives in Stepford are placid drones whose only ambition is cooking and cleaning. The Stepford Wives is very much a 1970's film with overtones of environmental pollution,powerful corporate conspiracies,sexuality, and of course feminist dogma.

I disagree with the heavy-handed feminist message of the film which is that most men would prefer their wives to be obedient maids rather then equal partners.

There are a few good moments in The Stepford Wives though. Tina Louise does very well with a small role and it's hard not to feel pity for her when she confesses that her husband never really loved her.

I recently watched "The Reincarnation of Peter Proud" on Youtube 40 years after I saw it in a theater.Reincarnation is a complicated subject, but the film does a fairly good job of explaining some of its intricacies.

Peter Proud (Michael Sarrazin) begins having strange dreams of people that he has never met and places he has never been to. In order to find some peace, he goes in search of the images in his dreams and finds them in a town in Massachusetts.

I really enjoyed the slow unraveling of the mystery and the performances are great, especially Margot Kidder as a widow with a terrible secret.