Tag: movies
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At the corner of ‘84 Charing Cross Road’ and Typewriter Street
A stately British bookseller and an American writer exchange letters across the pond? Sounds like a cozy English romance novel to me. Turns out 84, Charing Cross Road is neither a novel nor a romance, but a collection of actual letters from over 20 years of correspondence, and it’s delightful. Frank Doel, one of the booksellers…
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Media of the moment
An ongoing series on books, movies & more I’ve encountered recently: Nurtured By Love by Shinichi Suzuki. Great little book on how to cultivate talent, specifically in children and music but also for anyone in anything. On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor. Enjoyed the adventure of this winding, informative book on the nature of trails…
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School of Rock
“We’re not goofing off. We’re creating musical fusion.” The video of a guy drumming to the “Just give up” speech from School of Rock inspired me to rewatch that 2003 Richard Linklater film for the first time in a while. It’s a meaningful movie for me, coming out when I was in high school and…
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Drumming to Dewey Finn in ‘School of Rock’
File this under “things I’d never think of but now make perfect sense”: drumming synced to Dewey Finn’s “Just give up” speech in School of Rock. Incredible. He has a bunch more too, like Willy Wonka and Fawlty Towers. School of Rock was a formative movie for me. It came out when I was in…
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Entertaining ‘Angels’: which ‘Home Alone’ fake gangster film is the filthiest?
Here’s an important question for the Christmas season: which is better, Angels with Filthy Souls or Angels with Even Filthier Souls? Both share a template: character walks in, gets threatened/insulted by Johnny, gets blown away by Johnny, and gets a memorable kicker. Kevin McCallister also enjoys a smorgasbord while watching both of them, and gets…
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Little Women
I was a good amount into a post celebrating the 1994 film Little Women when I discovered I was basically writing Alissa Wilkinson’s appreciation of the film at Vox from last year. It’s one of many movies I watched a lot with my sisters as a kid, in rotation with other female-focused ’90s films like Ever After, Never…
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Family Video to the rescue
Home for Thanksgiving weekend and in the market for a Christmas movie to watch, my sister suggested Die Hard. A great choice for many reasons, one of which being I hadn’t seen it in a while and was due for a seasonal rewatch. Plus my wife hadn’t seen it. (Perish the thought!) The problem was…
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A Ghost Story
“O’er all there hung the shadow of a fear, A sense of mystery the spirit daunted, And said, as plain as whisper in the ear, The place is haunted.” – Thomas Hood, “The Haunted House” I thought of that poem, used to great effect in Slow West, after seeing A Ghost Story, David Lowery’s breath of a film.…
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‘Spotlight’ The News
Let me second Rod Dreher’s considerations of Spotlight in light of the Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore sexual harassment scandals: It was even better than I remembered it. One aspect of the movie stood out in sharp relief: the way so very many people in Boston knew for years that there was something horrible going…
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Adventures in portable television studios
Happy #BackToTheFuture Day! Here’s a video explaining the trilogy’s groundbreaking effects:
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Thoughts on ‘Thor: Ragnarok’
Whenever the punching started, Thor: Ragnarok felt like a Marvel movie. Once the punching stopped, it felt like a Taika Waititi movie. Luckily Waititi’s mark on the movie is strong enough to overwhelm the underwhelming elements. The Thor movies are my least favorite of the MCU thus far—I dare you to tell me anything about…
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Guess the movie
Movie trailers usually spoil too much so I try to get to theater showings late to avoid them. But since I was right on time to Thor: Ragnarok, these were the trailers I saw: Jumanji, Pacific Rim Uprising, Justice League, Black Panther, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Guess which one made me literally say…
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Media of the moment
I want to do more to account for what I read and watch. I do use Goodreads for tracking books, Letterboxd for movies, and my Logbook for all of them in one place. But between occasional reviews on the blog here and there, a lot of other noteworthy pieces of art pass through my consciousness almost without comment.…
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Columbus
Columbus, the first feature film of the talented film essayist Kogonada, calls enough attention to its subjects to captivate viewers but keeps enough distance to inspire pursuit, which is usually a formula for great cinema. Haley Lu Richardson’s Casey, a recent high school graduate, works at the library in Columbus, a small Indiana town that’s…
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The People’s Machine: On ‘California Typewriter’
As was the case with Tom Hanks’s new typewriter-inspired short story collection, I was the easiest mark in the world for the new Doug Nichol documentary California Typewriter, which profiles the titular typewriter repair shop in Berkeley and the wider place of the typewriter in modern culture. Though I’ve been anticipating the film for a while, I…
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Obit
Obit is an eloquent, observant, and superbly crafted documentary by Vanessa Gould on the New York Times obituary writers and the people they cover. One of the writers says writing obits isn’t sad because they are writing mostly about a person’s life rather than their death. I can see why that would be the case,…