Month: September 2015
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We Don’t Need Roads
Caseen Gaines, author of Inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon, leads this year’s deluge of commentary honoring the Back to the Future trilogy’s 30th anniversary with a wide-ranging and lovingly crafted retrospective on the development, production, and long afterlife of the 1985 time-travel classic. Built upon extensive interviews with cast, crew, studio executives,…
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Pay attention during ‘Children of Men’
I noticed the bustling in the background during my first viewing of Children of Men, but it was overshadowed by the main plot and everything else going on. It wasn’t until the second or third viewing when I started paying attention.
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Slow West
The refrain from Thomas Hood’s nineteenth century poem “The Haunted House” stands out not only because it appears about halfway through Slow West, John Mclean’s darkly funny reverie of a western, but because its final line—“The place is Haunted!”—breaks the iambic pentameter the poem employs throughout the rest of its eighty-five stanzas. Such a break jars…
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Little Big City
Imagine my surprise when fellow high-school classmate and garage band musician Aaron Shekey was mentioned in John McPhee’s latest essay for The New Yorker. McPhee quoted Shekey’s own essay from a few years ago called “It’s What You Leave Out”, about the curious case of the Madison skyline. “One of the more interesting things about the…
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Alternate names for Roving Reference
Itinerant Info Ambulatory Assistance Hovering Help Strolling Support Stack Stalking