By now it should come as no surprise to anyone that’s paid even cursory attention to these digital dispatches that I like the way Martin Scorsese makes movies. I concede this in advance not to cast doubt upon my opinion … Continue reading I’m on an island and I’ve got nowhere to swim
#45 — Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) I started working on a movie news and review program at my college radio station in the fall of 1990. This was when Siskel & Ebert were still at the height of their popularity and influence, and my cohort and I decided that we needed some way to regularly close out of review segments, something that provided as clean and convenient of a button as the famed Chicago critics’ pronouncements of which way their respective thumbs were pointing. We settled on a star rating, using the four star scale that seemed most common … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Forty-Five
Every time my Mac has a technical problem, my heart breaks a little. Continue reading They break your body and drain the life out of it
I arrived at my college radio station, a fresh-faced and impressionable little fellow, in the fall of 1988. At the time, U2 followed up their smash The Joshua Tree with a ludicrous cash-in double album that was a companion piece to a major motion picture. The Dead Milkmen convinced their fans to bum rush the request lines at MTV, making their song “Punk Rock Girl” an unlikely cult hit. Siouxsie and the Banshees had arguably the biggest college radio hit of the fall with the plainly spectacular “Peek-A-Boo” (perhaps the erstwhile host of 90FM’s “College Countup” can confirm or refute … Continue reading One for Friday: R.E.M., “Time After Time, Etc. (live)”
I would like to thank Videogum for bringing the photo of Stephen Colbert at the Olympics to my attention today. Were I stuck at the Olympics, I would also need some recreational reading with me. (Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”) Continue reading The way we walk, the way we talk, the way we stalk, the way we kiss
Oh, it’s a howler. Like a lot of members of a couple, the Hallmark holiday that occurred this past weekend was an excuse to venture into a movie theater. While there were potential horrors aplenty waiting to be strung up … Continue reading Got a curse we cannot lift, shines when the sunset shifts
It’s a tricky matter, using esteemed literary figures, real or imagined, as central characters in films. There is an overwhelming urge to make sure that every utterance from their mouth lives up to the lofty standards of their reputation, that … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Eight
“We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy. We refilled our coffee mugs on floors we didn’t belong on. Hank Neary was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat with a book taken from the library, copied all its pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked to the passerby like the honest pages of business. He made it through a three-hundred-page novel every two … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
#46 — Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995) At the time it seemed that, above all else, Sense and Sensibility proved that Emma Thompson could do anything. It was just three years earlier that she elbowed her way into debates intended to identify the finest actress of the era with her subtly inventive, Oscar-earning performance in James Ivory’s Howards End. She became quite busy after that, but still found time to expand which film jobs needed to included in her filmography by taking Jane Austen’s 1811 novel Sense Sensibility and skillfully adapting it into a screenplay. Through her effort, the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Forty-Six
For reasons I will go into in the near future, tonight I feel the need to remind myself why I like Sir Anthony Hopkins. This quote will do nicely. “I became an actor but I still don’t feel that I’m a part of this profession. I never have — 50 years I’ve been doing it. … It’s nice to get a knighthood but in the end it’s just the same old face in the mirror getting older and older — you have to shave every morning and you look at your face and think: this is it, this is the … Continue reading And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
Coffee for Two 