The Coen brothers have always had two sides: a brainy, Big Questions of Life side, and a playfully ironic side that loves nothing more than a good sight gag.  The same guys who brought us Nic Cage chasing a pampers-laden dog and George Clooney dragged off a freight train by his chained-up buddies gave us [...]

It’s Bernard Herrmann month on Turner Classic Movies, and though I’m nowhere near an expert on film scores, I do know Herrmann from John Williams, if only barely.  And in the  1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the composer does an Alfred Hitchcock: he appears, uncredited, in his own film.  Only, where [...]

In a past life, I was an editor for a scientific journal based in Amsterdam.  And though most everyone wrote on a word processor, it was in the days before electronic markup, so you’d give a paper back to an author all covered in editing marks, those curious little squiggles that indicated deletions, editions, and [...]

No, this isn’t a review of Inglourious Basterds, though admittedly, the title fits.  Rather, this is a piece bemoaning the death of the romantic comedy as we know it.  Now, I know some of you — especially you manly, Tarantino-loving, men’s men — would say “good riddance.”  But not me.  Not this manly, Tarantino . [...]

I’ve seen two new releases in the theater the past week, which is almost as many as I saw the entire Summer.  I would say that this summer was pretty horrible at the movie-plex (which is all we got here in Tuscaloosa), but every summer is really bad, and I’m pretty sure I said the [...]

Julie Powell

Seems like when bloggers are in a slump, they end up writing about blogging. Well, so be it. This is a post about blogging. It has burbled up from my recent viewing of Julie & Julia, which I wrote about here, for the simple reason that the film is about — [...]

I have a little game I play with Ingmar Bergman films.  You know, to provide a break from the absolutely grim subject matter, a distraction so I don’t kill myself when watching.  The idea is to read the various blurbs or synopses of the film to see which ones most capture the essence of the [...]

Harry Potter films are sort of like the old Illustrated Classics comics where “Ivanhoe” or “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” is made into a crappily-illustrated graphic novel that dumbs down the story to a three-year-old level.  Only they cost a lot more. Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Prince cost $250 million to make and $155 [...]

I’ve been watching a lot of films with theological content lately.  Seems only right, considering what I do for a living, but  I’ve been thinking specifically about them because I had to show four to a bunch of Presbyterians over the past few days.  What I chose was: Places in the Heart (I know, I [...]