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!
Re: La La
Catchy or not, are the songs in the 2016 movie musical, La La Land, interesting? I would say yes, almost all of them are---and they're catchy besides. Which means they are pretty good, contrary to what some of the critics think. Well directed by Damien Chazelle, the...
“Metropolitan”‘s Bright Boys And Girls
The characters in Whit Stillman's first film, Metropolitan (1990), are socially adept preppies (is that redundant?) who prove how much they've learned from and delighted in the prodigious world of ideas. Politics, social decline, literature, their own...
SS Thugs At Gleiwitz: The Film, “The Gleiwitz Case”
In August of 1939, German SS men attacked one of their country's radio stations at Gleiwitz on the German-Polish border with the aim of blaming the attack on the targeted Poles. Thus a pretext would exist for declaring war on Poland. Distributed by a company called...
Gallop On Outta Here, “Equus”
1977 was a bad year for cinema. Sidney Lumet's film version of the Peter Shaffer play, Equus, didn't make it any better. In Equus, we witness what amounts to a religious passion, for a nonexistent horse-god, and the morose psychiatrist (in the film, Richard Burton)...
Tom And Gerry In A Palm Beach Story
Born into a rich family, director Preston Sturges was inspired to supply in The Palm Beach Story (1942) some generous millionaires and billionaires who help a financially pinched married couple, Tom and Gerry Jeffers (Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert). So pinched...
Teens, Born-Again And Otherwise, In “Spring Breakdown”
Spring Breakdown (2010), by Melody Carlson, is one of the short books in a series, for young adults, about six teenaged girls. As a brief summary inside the book puts it: "The wealthy fashion students in Mrs. Carter's boardinghouse spend a quiet spring break in...
The Familia In “Family Law”
In Derecho de Familia (2004), a.k.a. Family Law, from Argentina, Perelman Sr. (Arturo Goetz) practices law. His son, Perelman Jr. (Daniel Hendler), teaches legal ethics at a university, although he too practices law as a defense attorney. That filmmaker Daniel...
The Good And The “Great Expectations”
A 1946 British film directed by David Lean, Great Expectations is a civilized and scintillating adaptation, with acting ranging from extraordinary to ordinary---most of it the former. Consider Finlay Currie as Magwitch and Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham. Almost...
A New Christian Movie, From Scorsese: “Silence”
I was worried that Martin Scorsese's Silence (2016), based on the fine Shusaku Endo novel, was ready to deem Christian apostasy no more unfortunate or dismaying than Christian commitment, but happily it refuses to do so. The honest and truthful content in Endo's book...
