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!
On Two Gems By Larry Woiwode: “Silent Passengers” and “Firstborn”
A horse falls on a boy called James in Larry Woiwode's 1993 story, "Silent Passengers," and of course he is hospitalized with dreadful injuries. Where is God? Well, though He is never mentioned in the story, He is there. Woiwode, a Christian, writes in such a way...
A Good Film From France: “Alias Betty” (’01)
The plot of Alias Betty (2001) is a bit too good for most screenwriters to have concocted, but not too good for the novelist Ruth Rendell, on whose novel--The Tree of Hands--it is based. A French film by Claude Miller, it concerns a mentally unbalanced woman who...
“Shadow of a Star,” Representation Of The Wild West
I would have enjoyed Elmer Kelton's novel, Shadow of a Star (1959)---"star" as in sheriff's badge---a tad more had it been devoid of the hackneyed concept of townspeople demanding that a deputy turn over to them an appalling killer so that he might be lynched. The...
Reader, He Married Both: The Movie, “The Bigamist”
The Ida Lupino film, The Bigamist (1953), turns Edmond O'Brien into a romantic. Director Lupino co-stars in the piece and, like scriptwriter Collier Young, is in a romantic mood; albeit, to be sure, O'Brien's character is a bigamist. He is married to both Lupino...
Is “Lone Survivor” Bound To Be A For-The-Ages Survivor?
Lone Survivor (2014) is an excellently wrought war movie that lets us know just how long a severely wounded human body can last. The wounds keep coming to the four Navy SEALs entrusted to a failed operation amid the forest trees of Afghanistan (and the SEALs give as...
Wellman’s Wild Bunch: “Yellow Sky”
William Wellman directed many serious films (The Ox-Bow Incident, The Story of G.I. Joe, Nothing Sacred) as well as superficial but pleasurable pop pictures like Yellow Sky, a 1948 Western wherein a band of thieves muscles in to take advantage of someone else's gold...
Faith Struggle: “God’s Not Dead: A Light In Darkness”
The interesting plot of God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness (2018) has Pastor Dave (David A.R. White) harriedly fighting an eminent domain plan pursued by fictitious Hadleigh University against Dave's long-standing church. The church is located on the university's...
A Neighborhood Called . . . Roma?
Roma (2018), written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron, is a social film, akin to a social novel, but one set circa 1970. Roma is a Mexico City neighborhood where a nanny, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), and the family she works for live. Cleo is a hard-working if imperfect...
Bring On Veronica Lake: “Bring on the Girls”
In the 1945 musical comedy, Bring on the Girls, actor Eddie Bracken is okay, Sonny Tufts is not. He is practically the leading man in the film and he has no charisma. Ah, but bring on the girls! Veronica Lake, unlike contemporary actresses like Jennifer Lawrence and...
