Okay, New England! It’s the time of year to shake the sand out of your pockets, fold up the beach umbrella, and load the station wagon for home. September is showing us how the change-of-seasons thing is done, with a string of days in the 70s and nights in the 60s. Time to dig out that box of sweaters and prepare for the gradual departure of your tan line.Read More
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School is back in session, an expression that can still send a slight chill down my spine even after an embarrassing number of decades later. Yes, there’s still the Labor Day weekend, but there’s always a touch of the melancholy about that last three-day gulp of freedom. Whoever the astronomer was who decreed that summer lasts until September 21 clearly didn’t live in New England. Read More
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The meaning of the last two weeks of August changes depending on which stage of life you’re in. For the young, it’s the bittersweet tail end of a period of delicious vacation, with the prospect of old people trying to teach you stuff for months on end, an idea that seems spectacularly dumb because of Google!Read More
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Yes, that quiet knocking on the door is actually August, ready to be flipped into position on your calendar. For sun worshippers and devotees of summer activities, it’s a sign to floor the accelerator of the summer ride, ‘cause even with the global climate in flux, autumn in New England doesn’t always wait its turn in September.Read More
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It’s July and there is sun to enjoy, drinks are being served on decks and patios, boats and kayaks are beckoning from the harbor, and there’s sand begging to be lain upon. So why am I inviting you to sit in a darkened theater and watch a movie? Let’s see how short I can make this.Read More
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Okay, here’s the setup. It turns out that during his legendary career of turning out pretty much nothing but masterpieces, Stanley Kubrick had an assistant named Leon Vitali. Vitali started out as an actor but gave up his career to spend two decades as Kubrick’s assistant, man-of-all-work, and enabler.Read More
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A national holiday, even one as somber as Memorial Day, is usually a beneficial break from routine.
But I count on routine to tell me what I should be doing on any particular day, and when I got to work today and discovered that I had blown my usual Monday afternoon invitation to a film discussion at The Music Hall, I grew slightly impatient with myself. I may even have said, “Darn it!” or something similar.Read More
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With most movies to which I send discussion invitations, I try to spend a little time giving you a sense of what the movie’s about and why you might want to see (and discuss) it.
With RBG (which we will be discussing on Tuesday evening), I think most of my work is already done.Read More
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