Blog
These stories have been around a long time. Some of them I have updated. Many of them I haven’t. This started out when blogs were like, new!
Where Things Are Insubstantial: “Ghost World” – A Movie Review
Ghost World (2001), by Terry Zwigoff, based on the underground comix of Daniel Clowes, mainly has to do with Enid (Thora Birch), a reserved, near-misanthropic adolescent just out of high school and, like her friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson), a misfit. Both girls...
A Couple in Flight: “Kites” – A Movie Review
An Indian film (with English subtitles) directed by Anurag Basu, Kites (2009) may be the most romantic lovers-on-the-lam movie ever made. Not that the romance doesn't become tedious, however, although an amorous scene in the attic of an empty house, with J. and...
Uh-Oh, It’s O.: “2016: Obama’s America” – A Movie Review
His father's anti-colonialism and pro-collectivism were instilled in Barak Obama when he was young, in all likelihood by his mother (Dad was gone). Later he learned from the likes of Communist member Frank Marshall Davis, and the rest is history as the same old...
“The Trial at Apache Junction,” Post-Trial – A Book Review
For a book published in 1977, Lewis Patten's The Trial at Apache Junction might seem like a pretty tired Western. But how tired, really, is such a novel when its story makes sense and its action passages are fairly imaginative? It concerns a sheriff who knows the...
I’ll Avoid That “25th Hour”, Thank You – A Movie Review
Spike Lee's 25th Hour (2003), which concerns a drug dealer's last day of freedom before his prison sentence begins, is a sluggish and offputting film which I didn't bother watching to the end. Lee's style is pushy and unreal, and there is too much of Terence...
When Donna Summer Ceased to Wander (Music)
It was in 1979 that the late Donna Summer had a Top 40 hit with "Fujiyama Mama". . . No, wait a minute! That was Wanda Jackson. Donna Summer had a hit with "Hot Love." I get confused because both women were pleasure-seeking pop stars who eventually turned to Jesus...
Focus on the 1920s: The Novel, “Bandbox” – A Book Review
Set in New York during the Twenties, Thomas Mallon's comic novel Bandbox (2004) chronicles the doings of those who put out fictitious Bandbox magazine for men. Indeed, they struggle to keep the magazine afloat in the face of such realities as gangster involvement and...
“The Pirates!” Are Here, Exclamation Point and All – A Movie Review
Pirates--i.e., evildoers--are sanitized and trivialized in the clay-animation feature, The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012), and there is a conspicuously silly plot, but a lot of good jokes crop up as well. Even something weird will occur now and then, as witness the...
Revenge in “Revanche” – A Movie Review
In Revanche (2009), from Austria, an ex-con named Alex (Johannes Krisch) works for a scurvy pimp and is secretly in love, and in a sexual relationship, with one of the pimp's prostitutes, Tamara (Irina Potapenko). Both wish to get away from the pimp and raise enough...
