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Category: film

  • riffin’

    I finally got around to finishing The Rolling Thunder Revue on Netflix this week. It was a long overdue watch, but I’m convinced it’s the kind of film you have to be tuned into a very particular frequency to really engage with. One of my favorite moments is a brief…

  • a strong nation

    Today is Jimmy Carter’s 97th birthday. One of my favorite cinematic moments of the last few years is the portrayal of his Crisis of Confidence speech in Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women. Carter once said, A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and…

  • fact, fiction, and truth

    In a recent interview with Marc Maron, director Barry Jenkins offered a few insights into the collision between fact, fiction, and truth: There was an article that come out about this textbook [which was] telling kids, high school students, that the American slave trade was a system of conscripted labor……

  • perfect isn’t perfect

    I’ve been trying to get the blood to flow back into my life lately. The last year has left me feeling a bit numb, due simply to the fact the chances for magic and synchronicity are severely diminished when you can’t leave your apartment. I’ve been trying to open myself…

  • a tiny reminder

    Despair is easy. Hope is much harder, but also more rewarding. I find the best way to hope is to look down at where I’m standing, then look up at the sky. I try to savor the now of it all, although I’m not always great at this. (I suppose…

  • farmers, pirates, and Anthony Bourdain

    I went to see Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain this weekend. Twice. Perhaps it’s the season of life in which I find myself, but Bourdain’s story resonated with me on a level that summoned a deep discomfort. The film paints a portrait of Bourdain as a contradictory…

  • assembling yourself

    I’m slowly nibbling my way through Mark Harris’s new book, Mike Nichols: A Life, an account of the late film director’s life and career. There’s a whole slew of things I didn’t know about Nichols, from the circumstances of his childhood as a Jew fleeing Germany in the late 30s…

  • every song ever

    It occurred to me yesterday how much we’ve lost in regards to the experience of the media we consume. As a teenager, there was something special about sitting in my car and peeling back the plastic on that new CD, leafing through the liner notes, slotting the disc into the…

  • gorging on forbidden fruit

    In this age of colossal cinematic crossovers (thing such as The Avengers or Godzilla vs. Kong), perhaps the one that beats all the others is Austin Kleon’s appearance on Andy J. Pizza’s Creative Pep Talk. In a conversation that ranges from setting creative rules for yourself to following your disgust,…

  • the importance of public space

    I recently watch The Last Blockbuster on Netflix, which was both magnificent and a little bit sad. But more than anything, it made me think a lot about Jenny Odell’s reflections on public spaces in her book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Odell writes, “True public spaces,…