Blog Archives
TRUST: Episode Two
The second episode of TRUST debuted on Easter Sunday night. Honestly, was caught up watching JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR LIVE before I switched over to TRUST and started it over to catch it from the beginning. SUPERSTAR was about as good as any bad musical might be — Alice Cooper’s Pontius Pilate stole the show. But [...]
Flint Town Lowdown
In 2016’s T-Rex: Her Fight for Gold directors Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper profile Flint, Michigan-based Olympic-gold medal boxer Claressa Shields. While they were shooting the fighter in her hometown, the filmmakers found themselves in the midst of a man-made disaster and its aftermath when Flint disconnected from Detroit’s water system in 2014 and started [...]
Long Gone John
When it comes to the arts, quantity and quality both matter. One of the reasons Pablo Picasso became the embodiment of modern art in Europe is because of his ceaseless production, and ability to master and destroy whole schools of painting before creating his own. That said, a poet like Walt Whitman essentially spent his [...]
Tessering Time
I went to a preview screening of the new A Wrinkle in Time film last night. I first found out about Madeleine L’Engle’s book when I was about 8 or 9 and reading stuff like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit. Honestly, Wrinkle didn’t really stick with me — it’s sort of more of [...]
Decrypting Black Code
Some events have impacted American culture with such force that the periods before and after they occur become defined as eras separated by the unprecedented – the Pearl Harbor and 9-11 attacks immediately come to mind as does the assassination of President Kennedy. But a new film about secrecy – and the lack of it [...]
Midnight Express at 40
The high point of cinema so far has been the American films made between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. Roughly speaking, these dates constitute the New Hollywood period when failing studios turned to young, maverick directors influenced by the anarchistic re-making of genre cinema by European directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. [...]
Forever Idaho
I saw My Own Private Idaho in the theater when it was released back in 1991. I mention this because the seemingly-timeless ‘Idaho simultaneously feels like a movie of its time, and of my time. In the 1990’s Generation X took over the culture: Nirvana, Bill Hicks, Tarantino. Anna Nicole Smith brought back the bombshell, [...]
Halloween 40
So last week I posted about John Carpenter’s 70th birthday and his films like They Live and The Thing. Carpenter’s Halloween isn’t 70, but the film is celebrating its 40th birthday and the slash-terpiece will get re-booted by David Fincher this October. Despite sequels/prequels and remakes/reimaginings, nobody has been able to rekindle the magic of [...]
Kubrick & The Craft
Stanley Kubrick is a giant among filmmakers and cinema fans for his excruciating attention to detail, the stylized performances he evokes, and the sheer scope of outrageously ambitious projects like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon. The director’s 1999 film, Eyes Wide Shut, closed-out both the 20th century and Kubrick’s career as the filmmaker [...]
A King is Born
Elvis Presley was born on January 8, 1935. Here’s Kurt Russell as The King in John Carpenter’s 1979 made-for-TV-movie, Elvis. As I remember, this is the end of the opening scene, before we flashback to Elvis’ childhood in Mississippi. Celebrate the birth of rock ‘n’ roll by watching TV Elvis shoot a hotel television… Please [...]
