Coraline isn’t an especially original story, in some respects. Literature and film is filled with tales of children who escape the drudgery and heartache of their lives by throwing themselves into fantastical worlds, worlds that may or may not exist … Continue reading Count down backwards from ten and everything’s okay, you can wish the world away
Revolutionary Road never had a chance. Months before it ever unspooled in a theater, it was the focus of agitated hype, the reunion of Titanic co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet held up as a major movie moment. As if … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2008 — Number Four
History is not tangible. Despite out attempts to commemorate it with statues and monuments, it’s not a piece of concrete that multitudes can look upon with reasonable assurance that everyone is seeing the same thing. Instead, it’s a collection … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2008 — Number Five
There’s more where that came from. (Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”) Continue reading Trouble keeping your head up when you’re hungry and you’re fed up
Most of the “One for Friday” digressions revolve around music that held special meaning for me during my earliest years in college radio. This is in part because I want to stick with material that’s clearly out of print, so looking back twenty years is a good start. But its also because this is the material that carries the most meaning for me. It’s the music I effectively grew up with. Thus far, I’ve stuck with music that I have on CD, which is a little on the tricky side because I wasn’t buying CDs back then. In fact, as … Continue reading One For Friday: The Primitives, “Outside”
So there’s this guy, right? He dresses up in a costume like a bat–well, it’s more inspired by a bat, I guess–and dives around in these supercool cars and motorcycles and stuff and he beats up criminals. Or perhaps you’re … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2008 — Number Six
#7 I highly doubt that Hollywood power brokers are aggressively examining the oeuvre of Mike Leigh in search of remake fodder. Lucky for all of us, since it’s easy to imagine the cheery monstrosity that would result if Happy-Go-Lucky fell … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2008 — Number Seven
#8 Something that works on the page won’t automatically work on the screen, especially when the original prose tends towards the ruminative. That may explain why the likes of John Updike and Philip Roth are relatively underrepresented on the big … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2008 — Number Eight
Some days, I’ll confess, I just try to fill the space. (Posted simultaneously (though why bother, really?) to “Jelly-Town!”) Continue reading She said, “Hang the rich.”
#9 Gus Van Sant’s Milk pulls off the gratifying trick of making the fact that its title character is gay simultaneously vitally central and utterly beside the point. Harvey Milk’s mid-seventies rise from San Francisco small businessman to influential political … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2008 — Number Nine
Coffee for Two 