Essays

There comes a moment in every movie when you have to decide whether you are going to stay the course or go looking for something else to do.  This doesn’t always mean that the movie has given you a great scene to grip your heart, or a bad scene that makes you wonder if doing...

I once had a neighbor with a three-legged dog named Scratch.  How Scratch came to be in this state was always a matter of some mystery.  Doug, his owner, knew that the loss was injury-related, but the animal shelter had conflicting stories of how it actually happened.  In the long run, though, the cause of...

Anyone who has ever sat through a college English course has heard this drone: “There are only (fill in the blank) stories out there.  Every one you read is just a variation.”  In my time, I have heard that fill-in-the-blank amount range everywhere from seven to twenty-one so I have no fixed number to offer. ...

The relationship between television and the movies has always been fraught. Nowadays, it is more than possible to see a movie at home on the day of its initial release.  This has become necessary, not just because of Covid, but also because of our “convenience culture.”  This is an ethos that takes the old saw,...

A hissing, persistent wind coaxes a tumbleweed down the clapboard-sided streets of a Texas town.  In the distance, a loud bang cuts the silence.  Is it a gunfight, a classic showdown in the El Paso or San Antonio of 1870?  No, it’s the backfire of a beat-up old truck struggling to make it home.  This...

The buddy action film is one of the key genres in the movies.  It is also one of the trickiest.  Meant to appeal primarily to men, they too often substitute wisecracks for characterization, violence for insights.  Worst of all, they constantly push macho buttons as a way of avoiding the horrible fear that someone might...

There are many filmmakers I love, but only a few that I hold in awe.  At the top of my list are the great Japanese minimalist Yasujiro Ozu, and the extraordinary British maximalist team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Powell and Pressburger created a series of remarkable films throughout the forties and into the...

Right from the opening chords that sound like a flock of vultures being heckled by a sarcastic mockingbird, you know you’re in a western unlike any other.  Welcome to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (available on Amazon).  Directed by Italian master Sergio Leone with a game changing score by Ennio Morricone, this is the western...

There is art and then there is guilty pleasure.  And King Vidor’s version of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead will never be confused for the former. If you will allow me my prejudices, I’m no fan of the work or philosophy of Ayn Rand.  With this in mind there should be absolutely no reason why I would want...

For me, being trapped in the house brings on an odd kind of nostalgia.  It isn’t that I’m wistful for when I had the flu and was bedridden for two weeks.  It’s just that the isolation makes my mind wander to little moments of great import from longer ago than I usually like to consider....