Published June 17, 2018
Lady Bird was released in December, but I didn’t get around to watching it until awards season, just before the Oscars. I meant to write something about it sooner, but life got in the way. I loved it enough to buy it, and I re-watched it this weekend.
Published May 3, 2018
My desire to see “The Post” owed mostly to my long career in newspapers, but motivations are often complex, and that was true about my interest in this movie. A believer in the role that newspapers have as watchdog, I felt an extra pull to view Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham. Those characters, the editor and the publisher of The Washington Post at the time of the controversial public disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, have been well known to me for decades.
Published February 2, 2018
The mass shooting Wednesday in Parkland, Florida, and the public reactions from students who survived it caused me to think a lot about high school. During my four years, nothing remotely close to it ever happened. Until Columbine in April 1999, something like that occurring on a high school campus was largely unimaginable to me.
Published February 12, 2018
Earlier this month, I reconnected with a good friend from college. Conversation soon turned to movies, and she recommended “Housekeeping” (1987). Directed by Bill Forsyth, it is based on Marilynne Robinson’s 1981 novel. If you watch it in a mood similar to mine when I saw it a couple of weeks ago, you might be taken aback by the use of the word “comedy” in the opening of Vincent Canby’s November 1987 review for The New York Times. Taken in full, the description “haunting comedy” feels closer to the mark.
Published October 23, 2017
I thought we were gonna get television. The truth is, television is gonna get us.
Over the weekend, I watched the 1994 film “Quiz Show” again. Like a lot of movies, books, short stories, TV shows, documentaries and news stories I’ve revisited in the past year or so, it unexpectedly spoke to the ugly realities of this point in time.
“In fact, I would pay vast sums for anyone to teach me to read the books I love at a snail’s pace.”
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Published June 11, 2015
“The Judge,” the 2014 film starring Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr. as a father and son, judge and lawyer, left a lot of good lines in my head, but the quote stuck in there right now wasn’t spoken by either of those Roberts.
Published May 30, 2015
James Stewart is the protagonist in “Harvey,” the 1950 film in which our man Elwood P. Dowd’s best friend is a 6-foot-3½ invisible rabbit, a pooka. This causes concern in Elwood’s family. Is it the booze? Is he crazy?
An exceedingly sad movie, beautifully told. Even the most quiet dignity contains at times achingly haunting and silent screams — of unrequited love or unfulfilled promise, or perhaps unbearable pain. Sometimes it is all three, and at other times … well, who’s to say?
Today’s Movie Quote Stuck in My Head comes from “Keeping the Faith,” the 2000 film starring Ben Stiller, Edward Norton and Jenna Elfman. They play childhood friends who grow up to be, in order, a rabbi, a priest and a businesswoman.
At one point, Norton’s character, Father Brian Finn, is struggling with his feelings for Elfman’s character, Anna Riley. Finn looks to the pastor of his church, Father Havel, played by longtime actor, writer and director Milos Forman. Father Havel shares his personal stories of inner conflict with Father Finn before getting to the heart of the matter.