Well, hi! I hope you’ve been having a nice pandemic. Me, I’m chugging along on a routine of sleeping in late, gardening, reading, watching enough television to brainwash a six-year-old, and sneaking in a little nap now and then.Read More
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I had planned to do a discussion of Emma on Tuesday night, just like we did during the before-times. The movie, the latest in the delightfully steady flow of remakes based on Jane Austen’s novels, is a very worthy retelling of the tale of the upper class, small-town matchmaker who needs to learn a lesson in humility.Read More
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Well, this year has been very interesting, hasn’t it? And by “interesting,” I mean boring as hell and scary as hell at the same time. No movies at The Music Hall and no discussions afterward; along with the coronavirus and some political unpleasantness, it sounds like a recipe for depression.Read More
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The major impression I’ve taken away from all the reading I’ve done is that Parasite is just plain good. By all accounts, we won’t leave the theater as the same people we were when we walked in. And that kind of unsettling experience is a major reason to go to the movies.Read More
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Pain and Glory is a story of an aging film director who is worried about whether his health will let him keep making movies. It’s about as close to an autobiographical film as Almodovar has ever made, although he cautions that it’s a mistake to take it as the literal gospel.Read More
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he real story of The Woman Who Loves Giraffes is the story of Dagg’s battle against academic scientists and their fear of letting a woman into the club. Despite a brilliant record of publication, she was denied tenure in her native Canada and left the field completely. But the bright side is that history sometimes corrects its mistakes and that has happened to Anne Innis Dagg.Read More
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It’s always interesting when a movie says that it’s “based on real events,” because movie buffs (like me) can do a little research and uncover the events, giving me a chance to criticize the movie on a whole new level. No matter how tangled the events, I can usually count on Hollywood to oversimplify the storyline and wrap things up with a reality-flavored bow.Read More
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We’re going to be doing a discussion of Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins on Wednesday night. Ivins’s best stuff was aimed at the Texas old-boy network, and the movie captures the changes in the dialogue about gender and other issues from the late '60s until her death in 2007. At least in Texas, it’s fair to say that she gave those changes a real boost.Read More
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