Film
The magic of film on film
The Showtime series Kidding (which I have not watched) did something quite amazing: One continuous, panoramic, uncut shot that shows the compressed transformation of a character and a space over the course of a year, portrayed in a little less than two minutes. The scene itself is amazing, but even better, the producers added an overhead camera…
Read MoreDr. Seuss’s The Grinch is feminist and lovely.
Elysha and I took Charlie to see Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch last weekend. It’s a great film, not unlike the cartoon that we grew up watching on television. And I’ve always thought it was a pretty brilliant story: Christmas is stolen from the Whos, but still they gather and sing on Christmas day, just as…
Read MoreDon’t sleep on Die Hard 2
Here’s the thing that everyone misses about Die Hard absolutely being a Christmas movie: So is Die Hard 2. Maybe even more so.
Read MoreThe most re-watched movies of all time
Below is the list of the 25 most re-watched movies according to a national survey. Some thoughts on this list: I haven’t seen 8 of the 25 of the films: The Sound of Music, Gone with the Wind, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Lion King, Finding Nemo, The Notebook, or Pride & Prejudice (though I…
Read More$126 is not a lot of money
Have you heard? Kevin Spacey’s latest film Billionaire Boys Club was exiled to video-on-demand in the wake of the sexual abuse allegations against the actor, and its theatrical release last weekend was less than expected: $126 on Friday and $162 on Saturday. While I’m saddened for the hundreds of other people involved – actors, directors, producers,…
Read More“Tears in the Rain” monologue captures it all
When all is said and done, we are the sum of our experiences. Our thoughts and feelings – who we are and what we believe – are the result of the memories that we carry forward of a life lived. Our minds are a vast storehouse of the millions of minutes that we have been…
Read MoreJurassic Park on the left. The Goonies on the right.
Weird. Right?
Read MoreMovies require logic in order to succeed. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri lacked that logic.
The thing that upsets me most about a film is a failure of logic. A movie is supposed to transport the audience to another world. At its best, it should make us almost forget our own world. I brought Charlie to Paddington 2 a month ago. In the middle of the movie, he bolted upright…
Read MoreOur boy watches Star Wars for the first time
My son Charlie, age 5, watched episodes 4, 5, and 6 of Star Wars with me and Elysha over the past two weeks. It was quite the experience. Though he knew almost nothing about Star Wars, he owns about a dozen action figures and received a Millennium Falcon for Christmas this year. He knew there were…
Read MoreAll I want for Christmas is a machine gun
Not really, of course, but damn do I love this sweater. For those of you who can’t quite pick up on the reference, it’s Die Hard, the greatest Christmas film of all time. In the movie, our hero, John McClane, has just managed to kill his first terrorist and acquired a machine gun. He sends…
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