HAPPIEST SEASON. Having made no secret of my childlike but abiding love of Christmas movies and despite our conventional notions of time and meaningful dates of demarcation having slipped away in 2020, I feel compelled to watch them. Maybe it’s a passive version of the denial that has led swaths of the populace to wantonly […]
Broadway Cinema
Posted inArts + Scene
Queens of the Season
CHRISTMAS ON THE SQUARE. Dolly Parton is never really out of public consciousness, amazingly maintaining her iconic presence in American culture without scandal, just working away and occasionally voicing her support for LGBTQ folks and Black Lives Matter, and doing weekly bedtime story readings online for children and frazzled adults during the pandemic. She’s having […]
Posted inArts + Scene
On Paper
MANGROVE. In yet another telling instance regarding the state of contemporary cinema, one more of its preeminent voices, Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, 2013) has transitioned to the small screen. Collaborating with the BBC and Amazon, he has created a five-part anthology series (really five movies varying in length from 60 to 120 minutes) […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Convention and Invention
JINGLE JANGLE: A CHRISTMAS JOURNEY. Somewhere on the deep end of my October horror movie binge, I noticed the nightly episodes of Murder She Wrote I needed to come down from an exorcism or a house full of haunted dolls were no longer available. Instead, with pumpkins still yet to carve, the Hallmark Channel had […]
Posted inArts + Scene
On Paper
WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME. Spoiler: We live in trying times. While hopeful news occasionally filters through the hateful noise of late — feels like a first for this year of less auspicious ones — and while some of it has induced an almost palpable unburdening, a lightening of the the spirit, it also […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Gothic Horror for the Hoi Polloi
I’ve been thinking a lot about Guy Fieri. I recently listened to an interview he did with Dan Pashman, host of The Sporkful podcast, in which they boiled the state of the nation down to a “Donkey Sauce/aioli cultural divide.” They’re the same thing, Donkey Sauce and aioli, according to Fieri himself — who also […]
Posted inArts + Scene
A Simpler Time
BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM. There is the impulse to refer to bygone times as “simpler” and, by extension, better. But the past is not always simpler than the present. I suggest this because 1) I would rather not believe that Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) was released 14 […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Lingering Feelings
THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR. As I looked up the offerings for this week, I knew The Trial of the Chicago Seven, the Aaron Sorkin drama about the courtroom aftermath of the protests at the1969 Democratic convention, would be the movie of the moment. The New York Times even published a historical explainer as a […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Fun-size Assortment
I ‘d say I’m fairly neutral, as far as Halloween goes. I don’t particularly like or dislike costumery. The proliferation of candy is fine, if eventually problematic — I’m thinking of gasping adults devouring “fun size” chocolate bars like they’re emergency rations. And the aesthetics and iconography, while fun, conjuring sense memories of times of […]
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A Long, Funny Goodbye
DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD. Netflix, as both bellwether and arbiter of contemporary taste, has long led the drive to popularize and, at least to some extent, legitimize documentary movies in the mainstream. Not that the medium needed legitimizing among movie nerds, of course, but established norms have traditionally pushed all but the noisiest documentaries to […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Bad Old Days
AVA. There is certain cold, maybe sick comfort in watching a new, distinctly middle-of-the-road American action movie with an incidental plot and almost interchangeable heroes and villains. It helps to have a couple of knock-down, drag-out fight scenes and at least one sympathetic character in some sort of existential crisis. Throw in some actors I […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Dark Turns on Country Roads
THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME. This country has long suffered from an identity crisis — 2020 has turned it into an outright catastrophe but it was a pre-existing condition going back almost as far as the nation itself. City does not know what to do with Country and vice versa, each population distrusting the other […]