January 21st It’s too bad that I’m out of Ormond-Pirkle collaborations, because I was starting to develop a fondness for Pirkle’s sermons. They have a Homeric flavor to them, a use of Bible verses like epithets. Hector, breaker of horses has transformed over the centuries to Hell, where the worm does not die and the… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (1/21-1/25): Tsars, Commissars, and Pezidents
Riz Ahmed looked really comfy while he was presenting these nominations. Allison Williams also looked comfy, for sure, but I’m so jealous of how cozy his fit was. I wish I could watch these from bed like all you Californians. 1) Oscars nominations and the College Football Playoff are getting more and more like each… Read More 95th Academy Awards Nominations: Hastily Scribbled Thoughts
January 16th Jonathan Kaufer was a precocious guy in his mid-twenties when he wrote and directed Soup for One, and boy does this movie really feel like it’s the brainchild of a guy in his mid-twenties who saw Annie Hall a bunch when it came out. I don’t know that Soup for One has the… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (1/16-1/20): Heaven and Hell
January 11th With a name like “Estus Pirkle,” it has to be good. I know that the civilized thing to do with a movie like this is to laugh it off, and the movie gives us opportunities to do exactly that. The makeup on some of these people, done by Ron Ormond’s then-wife June Carr,… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (1/11-1/15): Contrive It Like You Stole It
In 1992, a recently reunited folk band from southeastern Finland, singing in a dialect with maybe 35,000 native speakers, released their fourth album, Seleniko. Six years later, a children’s show produced in Boston featured one of their songs as an addictive pop hit from an equally mysterious music group. (This sounds like the start of… Read More Arthur S3E6, “Binky Rules/Meet Binky”
January 6th In English, you’ll sometimes see this given the name of the novel it’s based on, A Judgment in Stone. If I were naming the movie, I would probably default to something a little less grand than its French title or its English one. At the risk of jacking up the comedy factor a… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (1/6-1/10): Meet the Gladneys
January 1st Every year it seems, there’s a documentary that a number of critics go gaga for and which inevitably disappoints me. In 2018 it was Minding the Gap, in 2019 it was Collective, in 2020 Time, 2021 Flee, and this past year Fire of Love. “Disappoints” is a purposefully vague term meant to cover… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (1/1-1/5): India Songs
This year, I watched more new-to-me movies than I’d ever watched before in a single year. I don’t have all that much in common with Pauline Kael, but as she boasted that she never saw a movie twice, I much prefer to learn a new movie rather than experience a movie I’ve seen before. I… Read More 2022 Year-End Review: What I Learned
You can find the introduction and index for this series here. I did it! I got two! The new inductees for the National Film Registry were announced today. After writing about one hundred movies that I’d like to see saved by the National Film Registry or some hypothetical equivalent, two of them have actually been chosen… Read More 100 American Movies to Save: Epilogue
You can find the introduction and index for this series here. Film Director Year Type The Village M. Night Shyamalan 2004 Narrative feature A Place of Our Own Stanley Nelson 2004 Documentary “Lazy Sunday” Jorma Taccone 2005 Short Man Push Cart Ramin Bahrani 2005 Narrative feature Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room Alex Gibney 2005… Read More 100 American Movies to Save: Preservation (2004-2010)
Seeing Things Secondhand 