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
I’ve long thought that opening act has to be about the worst gig possible. The audience isn’t there for that band, so they generally alternate between rudely ignoring the performance or, even worse, loudly announcing their impatience. Slogging through a set that’s met with nothing but indifference has to be incredibly disheartening, perhaps almost as disheartening as killing time on a music stage during a county fair. Which brings me to the best opening act set I ever saw: Blue Rodeo before an Edie Brickell and New Bohemians performance in Milwaukee, circa 1991. Brickell and the boys had recently put … Continue reading One for Friday: Blue Rodeo, “What Am I Doing Here?”
Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc. is a convincing call to action, a well-argued op-ed, an act of urgent revelation. Like most documentaries in the era shaped by Michael Moore, it begins with its treatise and conclusions fully formed and fills in … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Nine
Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, 1978). Two years after the breakthrough success of Taxi Driver, which he scripted for Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader made his directorial debut with a film about struggling auto workers who battle their callous bosses, inept union heads and ultimately each other. As should probably be expected from Schrader, especially at this point in his career, the film is raw and potent, getting into the muscular, profane urgency of these men as they struggle to accept their lot in life, including the inherent betrayals of principle that come with any efforts at upward mobility, and the dangers … Continue reading Klores and Stevens, Schrader, Toback, Wyler, Zonca
Four years ago, I posted a photo I found of a young woman proudly showing off a unique piece of balloon art. The following day, I posted a similar piece of artistry in the medium of inflated latex, and thus … Continue reading Someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares
