Posts Tagged ‘ hbo ’

Conspiracy is so accurate and realistic, forcing the viewer to see by proxy a real meeting held by Nazi Germany’s administrators to plan The Holocaust that it actually leaves the viewer quite literally on the verge of nausea.  It is a horribly sad, but true tale, based upon the one surviving copy of the meeting’s notes found in the aftermath of World War II.

HBO and writer/director Scott Z. Burns bring us this sensational, utterly believable and simultaneously terrifying story of a man named Timofey Berezin (Paddy Considine) working in one of the Soviet Union’s many secretive nuclear plants who is exposed to a fatal amount of radiation and must find a way to get enough money for his wife Marina (Radha Mitchell) and his son to continue to live pleasantly after his inevitable death in what is appropriately titled Pu-239 or The Half Life of Timofey Berezin. The officials at the plant lie about his exposure and try to get him to sign a statement to the effect that it was an error in his judgment to enter a chamber and try to repair some damage. When he refuses, they suspend him indefinitely without pay, pending a hearing. Worried about his family’s future life when he finds out about his true level of radiation exposure, he decides to steal a sizable quantity of plutonium (Pu-239), which is the nuclear material from which nuclear weapons are made, and then try to sell it for the $30,000 he estimates his family will need.

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This movie is an interesting example of how great movies can be made outside of traditional independent avenues and rather with the help of a premium cable movie network, in this case HBO. Maria Full of Grace is a new movie set primarily in rural Columbia revolving around the life of Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a teenager whose life is about to break free of its bondage to a family that squanders her hard-earned money, to a boyfriend who has impregnated her and is unworthy of her company, to friends who are more like tagalongs, to a dead-end job at a rose plantation, and blossom in the United States with the promise of easy-money to be earned as a drug mule.