Melanie, the BuddhaChristLamaDoormat of “Gone With the Wind”
“Gone With the Wind” is an alternately enchanting, preposterous, compulsively readable/watchable turbo-charged romance of seduction, goodness and cynicism. Along the way, it is also top-heavy on the...
View ArticleThe Tragicomedy of “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.”
Many critics are lumping Adamma Ebo’s “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” into the comedy genre, and suggest the movie should have stuck to its lane in drawing laughs at the hypocrisy and thinly...
View ArticleBodies in Motion: A Meditation
Sometimes, in the diffused light of dawn or dusk, or on foggy streets where almost indiscernible shapes begin to reveal themselves as a human being or two in motion, I will peer a little closer, catch...
View ArticleQuirky Movie Lover’s Delight: John Carney ‘s Hybrid Musical, “Once”
A busker is wailing his heart out to an audience of absolutely no one as drivers and pedestrians go about their business on a Dublin sidewalk. His brow furrowed and throat straining, he espies a...
View ArticleTo Look, To See, To Linger, To Love
A few years ago, I was writing a script and coordinating with a production company to create a short video with narration and music. Part of my task was to amass a large cache of photos, each of which...
View ArticleDocumentary Two-Fer: The Musical Odysseys of Leonard Cohen and Jason Isbell
One an observant, mystically inclined Jew, born to wealthy, pedigreed parents outside Montreal, a poet by training and temperament, handsome, charismatic and refined, who drifts down to New York City...
View ArticleFreedom, Fanaticism, Retrenchment: John Brown and the Southern Baptist...
Two events drew my attention and stood in severe contrast last week. One was coming across the 2020 Showtime mini-series, “The Good Lord Bird,” about pre-Civil War abolitionist John Brown and his...
View ArticleA Pastor Grapples With Faith and the Future: Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed”
A young eco-activist confronts the massive evidence of humankind’s abuse of the earth, and he spirals downward in a doom loop of despair. The new life growing in his wife’s belly offers no solace....
View ArticleBreak the Record, Die Trying? Free Diving With Laura McGann’s “The Deepest...
In the long summer months—which in the generally sunny climes where I have lived I regard as May through at least September—I have long made a habit of swimming in as many backyard and club pools as...
View ArticleA Meditation on “Oppenheimer”
*** First: the primeval fear and wonder, the fact of existence itself, the gaping at the savannas, the odd and menacing creatures abounding, the vast sprawl of the stars. Noting the deep growl of...
View ArticleMaira Kalman’s “The Principles of Uncertainty”: Most Certainly a Gem
“If you are ever bored or blue, stand on the street corner for half an hour,” writes the visual artist and spare-time existential philosopher Maira Kalman in “The Principles of Uncertainty,” her wholly...
View ArticleWhy I Quit Watching “The Sopranos”
When my daughter was four or five years old, we took her to a highly touted “children’s movie” animation having to do with the escapades of a pony finding its way through fraught circumstances. I...
View ArticlePhotojournalist James Nachtwey: Pictures Worth All the Views a Heart Can Bear
So much suffering. Catastrophe upon catastrophe, really, the long chronicle of humanity’s vast inhumanity and indifference to our fellow humans a kind of psychosis draped in the flags of country,...
View ArticleJon Batiste Learns to Breathe in Monumental “American Symphony”
There’s a scene some 40 minutes into Netflix’s stirring documentary on musician/composer Jon Batiste when his adult self is back on the piano bench with his long ago teacher from Juilliard School of...
View Article“Will & Harper”& the Long Road of “Transitioning” To a True Self
We Americans are suckers for buddy road trips. Two young-ish guys, a guy and a gal, two gals, it matters not. Fill up a suitcase, an ice chest and the gas tank, take the top down if you can, plop into...
View ArticleTo That Bounding, Swirling Dog in the Park, and Leonardo da Vinci, and My...
A hound bounds through the wet grass as I walk the park across from my house. It cuts sharply left, then right like a fleet NFL running back. Seeming to think momentarily of drawing even with its...
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