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!
Jane The Bachelorette In “Jane the Virgin”
So far I'm indifferent to My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Jane the Virgin is crazy enough, for all its soapy conventionality. In the most recent episode, a Jane doppelganger called Bachelorette Jane shows up, pleading for our heroine to hurry up and choose which man to...
I Wish “Sicario” Was Better. Even so . . .
The new movie, Sicario (2015), is about the labor of U.S. operatives in trying to wreck a horrifying Mexican drug cartel. I don't entirely believe the film any more than I entirely disbelieve it: for example, is it not true that Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), an FBI...
A Provocative Flop: The ’95 Film, “Amateur”
Hal Hartley's Amateur (1995) stars Isabelle Huppert, who wanted to work with Hartley after seeing his good film Trust, as a former nun who helps and is attracted to a man with amnesia and a very ugly criminal past which he naturally can't remember. This ex-nun, a...
The Return Of “Jane the Virgin”
That tour de force of commercialism, Jane the Virgin, is back for a second season. Gina Rodriguez is older (31) and looks it. Andrea Navedo, the woman who plays her mother, is only 38 (!) though she could pass for 44. Which doesn't mean Navedo isn't pretty; she...
Here, The Premiere: “The Hourglass Project” In Tulsa — A Theater Review
Future technology permits five elderly people to go back to age 20 and thus elude death, but the supervisor of the project, Dana, has difficulty making these people happy about it and even keeping them in line. This constitutes part of the action in Lee...
On The Third Novel By Christian Author Marilynne Robinson – A Book Review
2008 saw the publication of the Marilynne Robinson novel, Home, which explores such common themes as religious faith, old age, personal failure, and forgiveness. But, as it relates what occurs between Christian believer Glory Boughton and her prodigal brother Jack,...
An Almost Unbearable Mistake: The Movie, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”
The first time I read Milan Kundera's novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I enjoyed it; when I started it a second time I was bored---an effect I don't think any of the great classic novels of earlier decades would ever have on me with further readings. In some...
“The Intern” She Cherishes — Nancy Meyers, That Is
In The Intern (2015), director-writer Nancy Meyers creates a female character, Jules, who has it all. Or she nearly does. At the same time, Meyers has fashioned two of the kind of male characters she will value and cherish for the rest of her life: i.e., men who are...
Here Come The Revenuers: The 1950 Movie, “The Jackpot”
Nothing spoils contest goods, such as those won by Jimmy Stewart's Bill Lawrence in The Jackpot (1950), like Uncle Sam via the IRS. Bill gives the right answer to a radio-show question and receives the loot the federal government becomes so eager to tax,...
