Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Sam Neill, Richard Attenborough, Laura Dern As a general rule, I don’t make a habit of seeing blockbusters in theaters. Most of them don’t really interest me, and I am in deep superhero-movie fatigue; the concept of the Marvel Universe painstakingly coming to film after film after film, an idea that… Read More Jurassic Park (1993)
Dir. James Bridges. Starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas Spoilers for The China Syndrome abound below. Usually I wouldn’t include a spoiler alert for a movie that’s more than thirty years old, but the film is fairly taut, and knowing too much about it would detract from the viewing experience. It’s Los Angeles in… Read More The China Syndrome (1979)
There are some books that I read over and over again. From the time I was in sixth grade up into my last year of college, I read To Kill a Mockingbird at least twice a year. (I’ll be citing the edition that is yellow and a little torn beyond its years: it’s the first… Read More Villainous Age in Harper Lee’s “Oeuvre”
Dir. John Ford. Starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Henry Brandon The diagetic portions of this movie begin with a surprisingly striking image: a woman stands in a doorway, black in the way Pierre-Auguste Renoir said a painting should never use black, her silhouette blocking the majestic view of the ostensibly Texan skyline. (It’s Monument Valley,… Read More The Searchers (1956)
Last hour, we had our first Potter Lightning Round (which doesn’t really need to be in boldface, but I kinda like it that way), wondered why there are four Hogwarts houses instead of three, and celebrated the sinking of the good ‘ship Harmony. On with the show! Hour #4: p. 388 to p. 518 (“Xenophilius Lovegood” through… Read More Live Blogging Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Fourth Hour
Here goes another one of my full-movie commentaries. Today, it’s Disney’s Hercules, which was perhaps my favorite movie in elementary school and is certainly responsible for the interest in mythologies which weirded the heck out of my neighbors when I was a seven-year-old. Consider, for example, this paraphrasing of my Halloween experience in 1998: Me: Trick… Read More Hercules (1997)
Seeing Things Secondhand 