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
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
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
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
“I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God,” so said master filmmaker Stanley Kubrick about his breakthrough movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Learn more in this YouTube video... The imagery throughout the film strongly suggests the monolith is the working of God,… Continue reading Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey | The God Complex | Film Analysis on YouTube
Big Sky Country is home to some of the most awe-inspiring vistas on the planet, from mountains to lakes and prairies, and some of the most amazing animals in the United States, but nature cannot hide the poverty plaguing small towns like Browning. Glacier National Park occupies 1,583 square miles in the northwestern corner of… Continue reading Montana’s breathtaking beauty and heartbreaking poverty, plus our encounter with a grizzly bear
More than twenty years ago, Steven Spielberg completed Stanley Kubrick’s final passion project, a film about artificial intelligence and machines that is equal parts prophetic from a modern perspective, uneven as a movie, and unfulfilled as a work of art. Today, everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence. The emergence of ChatGPT and subsequent competitors capable… Continue reading Spielberg’s thought provoking bastardization of Kubrick, A.I. Artificial Intelligence
My writing process can best be described as vomiting on the screen and sifting through it in search of an editable morsel. The morsel is then preserved as I throw up again and repeat the process. Many morsels do not make it, some do as the process repeats itself into something resembling a final product. … Continue reading Celebrating 500 posts: Why and how I write
The master director never said what he is claimed to have said regarding a ghost opening the larder door in the famous scene. It is a quote that is often taken grossly out of context to justify the existence of ghosts in his cinematic masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BZ9J3joPpI Stanley Kubrick did not actually say what he is… Continue reading YouTube video: Stanley Kubrick never said there were ghosts in The Shining
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 