Confessions of a Conservative Atheist
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In 1994, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein almost ruined Kenneth Branagh’s career while this year’s equivalent of a remake from Guillermo Del Toro received almost universal praise despite making almost the same movie substantially worse. In 1994, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein almost ruined Kenneth Branagh’s career. Though opinions of the film have generally improved in the more than… Continue reading Frankenstein and a tale of two Hollywoods
Benjamin Franklin famously or infamously said that the country was a Republic, if you can keep it. To liken great things to small, this is a blog if I can keep it up, but isn’t that true of everything in life? When I started this blog in November 2020, it wasn’t clear to me how… Continue reading Celebrating 1,000 posts with a few near incoherent thoughts on the past, present, and future
I’m not sure which is the bigger achievement. David Lynch’s daring to tell an unfiltered story of the sexual abuse and suffering of a teenager in 1992, or to use it as a gateway to the modern media world, where world-building and origin stories rule. These days, cinematic universes are all the rage, but back… Continue reading Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and the unsettling birth of the cinematic universe
In an era where TV rarely ventured beyond the dreaded “To be be continued…” ending, Mr. Lynch and Mr. Frost placed a bet that people wanted more, that the mystery was important for the sake of the mystery, that not everything needed to be explained, and that sometimes things are better without an ending. In… Continue reading David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and the birth of two genres, at least
Mr. Lynch was a director’s director, an artist who operated well outside the mainstream, sometimes far outside of it, but whose appeal occasionally crossed over in both classic films such as The Elephant Man and the birth of prestige TV with Twin Peaks. David Lynch as had a career perhaps as strange as the film’s… Continue reading David Lynch and a life lived outside the frame
It’s human nature, but if you value what you have now, what you’ve seen, done, and hopefully learned, why would you want to go back to a point where you had none of it or at least less of it? Aging is a funny thing to say the least. I suspect almost all of us… Continue reading New Year’s, the mysteries of aging, and whether we’d really want to go back in time to be our younger selves
When you consider that the 1948 cult-classic was one of the master director’s lesser known and less heralded works, his achievement in cinema – which I would suggest amounts to nothing less than the invention of modern cinema, from its plot and characters to how it is filmed and edited – is all the more… Continue reading Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and the invention of the modern movie
Here is land where birds nest directly on the trail, crowding in the thousands. The sea lions play with you in the crystal waters. Schools of eagle rays drift by like silent specters in the night while sea turtles make their way beneath. Lizards lounge on the beach, daring you to get close. The sun… Continue reading An expedition to the Galapagos Archipelago and all the beer on the boat
Roger Ebert asked, “It’s tempting to search here for themes and a style he would return to in his later masterpieces, but...Seeing it without his credit, would you guess it was by Kubrick?” On the surface, the answer is self-evidently no, but to a more critical eye, we can see the early signs of an… Continue reading The Killing and the early genius of Stanley Kubrick
Much like music, a great film can exist purely on an emotional level, as a stream of loosely related and structured consciousness that teases us with symbolism, impenetrable to a complete analysis, and yet filled with meaning all the same. Federico Fellini’s 1963 surrealistic fantasy about a film director struggling with his love life and… Continue reading Fellini’s 8½ and whether or not reality matters in either art or life itself
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 