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!
Scandalized: The Movie, “Spotlight”
In the early 2000s, a right-wing website propounded that Catholic seminaries possibly around the world had become havens for homosexual men. If this is true, it is hardly the biggest shocker one could hear that out of these havens came priests who were pedophiles...
Then I Read Her Book, Now I’m A Believer — A Book Review
Apropos of the 2008 book, The Believers, by Zoe Heller, who are the "believers" in this novel? Well, Joel and Audrey Litvinoff are fervent believers in left-wing politics, as well as staunch atheists. Their daughter Rosa, like her parents an ethnic Jew, is very...
Hunger, Slapstick, “Modern Times”
Of course, modern times in the 1936 Modern Times, by Charles Chaplin, means the Depression. Chaplin's Tramp and Paulette Goddard need work, and although they find it, they unexpectedly lose it. But then find it again. The objective is to stay one step ahead of...
Briefly, “The Affair” (Season 1)
The first season of the Showtime series, The Affair, which I just finished watching on DVD, may get confusing up to a point; but by episode 9 it becomes a striking, affecting tragedy, not exactly common in the TV shows I've seen. Plus, some magnificent stuff comes...
Little Drummer Boy – My Video
The Little Drummer Boy is one of my favorite Christmas songs. it was originally know as "Carol of the Drum" and was written by Katherine Kennicott Davis in 1941. This is version was recorded in my home studio using Reaper software. It's really just a practice...
Does “The Salvation” Save Itself?
In 1871, a Danish immigrant (Mads Mikkelsen) kills two men who murdered his wife and his young son. One of these men is the brother of a virile fellow (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who used to be a good man but is now cruel and wicked. He finds and brutalizes the immigrant,...
I Get The Point: “Zabriskie Point” (The 1970 Film)
The critics in 1970 were right to adamantly reject Zabriskie Point, the American-made Michaelangelo Antonioni film. It is dumb, anemic and ill-structured. Signore Director believed the alienation of young people in the 1960s, and of the New Left, was as significant...
December 2015 Review Of “Jane the Virgin”
The Season 2 Christmas episode of Jane the Virgin ended on an alarming note---once again our sympathy goes to Petra---but it was the "mid-season finale" so we'll have to wait till late January to see what happens. Alarming or not, though, there sure was a lot of...
Mooning Over Samson: The 1949 “Samson and Delilah”
The fight with the lion and the final annihilation of the Philistines wrought by Samson between the pillars are dandy scenes in Cecile B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). And if you want sensuality, mostly that of Hedy Lamarr (Delilah), that's there too. But...
