My Favorite Movies: The Original Star Wars Trilogy (1977-1983)
It is nearly impossible to see this as [...]
My Favorite Movies: The Original Star Wars Trilogy (1977-1983)
It is nearly impossible to see this as one picture, and given the clatter over what has come in its wake, it sometimes helps to pull it back down to basics. So, here we are. This may be the most personal of all. The original Star Wars trilogy was my grand introduction to film. The […]
My Favorite Movies: The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
Martin Scorsese took an approach to the mindset of Jesus Christ that few other filmmakers have dared: to examine the most famous, and yet oddly illusive, person in all of human history, a man that we have been taught from childhood was both God and man and examine how Jesus must have felt about his […]
My Favorite Movies: Sita Sings the Blues (2009)
One of the most wonderful and joyous musical comedies that I have ever seen was also one of the biggest coups by any film artist in history. Writer-director Nina Paley spent four years making Sita Sings the Blues on her own computer, and used the film as a weapon in a personal battle against the […]
Jailhouse to Milhouse (2024)
I had a minor resistance walking into Buddy Farmer’s Jailhouse to Milhouse. So many documentaries about celebrities working through hard times to their career glory tend to be so flattering and clean that one can feel the lawyers in the room – for examples, witness the recent docs on Disney+ about Jim Henson and Stan […]
Public Defender (2024)
It is not a job that anyone would be angling for. Who wants to be the public defender fighting for those going to trial for their involvement in the January 6th riots. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. And, in Andrea Kalin’s documentary Public Defender that person is Heather Shaner, a […]
The Herricanes (2024)
Did you know there was a women’s football league in the laye 70s that played for four seasons? Neither did I, but given the tow-hold that women have been struggling to gain in every male-dominated field since the women’s movement of the early 1970s, it didn’t surprise me. But yes, just like A League of their […]
My Name is Alfred Hitchcock (2024)
Safe to say that no filmmaker in the history of the medium had a better understanding of his audience than Sir Alfred Hitchcock. Hitch had us by the throat. He famously said that he played his audience like a piano, and mercifully, he played tunes worth listening to. His films were approachable perhaps in the […]
Micro Budget (2024)
Micro Budget is a rambunctious comedy with the same absurdist flow as something like “Parks and Rec” or “The Office” or about 90% of what is currently on “Saturday Night Live” if you shave off the persistent political stuff. It’s a very funny movie that feels like a modern TV sitcom, which is both a […]
