Category Film/TV

I’d like it known that I read the book first.

Which, as all literarily inclined people know, is the right and proper order of things in a modern media age when Hollywood regularly absconds with your favorite tales and more often than not turns them into something  shallow and alien. This inevitably causes you to exhort those who reversed the natural order of things by walking in blind to see the movie: “Oh, you just have to read the book!”

In the case of Noah and its film iteration from director Darren Aronofsky and Paramount Studios, we have the good fortune that most everyone grows up at least hearing about this strange tale involving a very ticked-off God telling his obedient servant to build a humongous ark that will literally save the last living things on the planet.

Still, it had been a while since I visited the real story, which, for all its epic grandeur, plays out in a compact 2,300 words ...

A slew of almost electrically talented backup singers grappling with never quite breaking the stardom barrier and a lonely man with his new girlfriend-the-operating system filled up a dreary weather Saturday last weekend, reminiscent of the “double bill” presentations that were de rigueur in the movie houses of my boyhood.

Oh, what a filmy weekend it was.

Synopses of the movies in question: Twenty Feet From Stardom and Her, can be gleaned from the trailers below, so what will concern us here is but one thread that works its way through both films, dominantly in Her and as an interesting side story in Twenty Feet.

Boiled down to its essence, the issue is: Are other people all that necessary?

Late in Twenty Feet, one of the fabulous, magnetic backup singers the film so lovingly depicts is reflecting that at some point in recent years “the phone stopped ringing” as much as it used to...

Few filmmakers convey the desolation of the physical landscape and its various reflections in the human heart as well as the Coen brothers. Their current film, Inside Llewyn Davis, takes this desolation to new (and cold!) heights in its portrayal of a marginalized, barely surviving folk singer wandering the unforgiving winter streets of Greenwich Village and Chicago in the early ’60s. Davis is homeless, which requires him to spend inordinate amounts of energy searching for a couch where he and his guitar can flop for a not-overly-imposing night or two while he awaits some kind of break or affirmation that his hope of making it in the music world isn’t completely misguided.

Among his many problems, though, is that even hope itself seems to have been beaten down in him by the time the film picks him up as a sad-eyed, occasionally mendacious soloist, pushing into his 30s with nary an asset nor credential to...

Fog is rich—in mystery, in metaphor, in intrigue. Fog was noir before noir existed at all. We walk out the door and espy the fog and up comes the collar and the shoulders, and we are set to hunker, hands in pockets and eyes all a-squint. If we’re walking someplace, we’ll be glad when we get there.

It can be treacherous, of course. Night or day, if the fog is thick enough, we have no bearings, no guideposts, nowhere to tack. This way, no, maybe that way, oh, maybe no way at all, stuck and aimless.

A voice might beckon to us, but from where? Sometimes it is best just to wait.

But fog can be a love, too. I was maybe 8 years old when I decided I’d one day live in Northern California, and it was the fog itself that beckoned me. I remember the moment...

There is this one life we are given. This we know. All the rest of it—the heavens, the reincarnations, the other life-as-rehearsal scenarios—let us set those aside for the moment and concentrate on the indisputable facts staring at us: We are born, we live, we die.

And most often, even if we are fortunate enough to ripen through the full flesh of our cycle on this earth, we will say it has passed too quickly, as unto a dream.

The grains. Through the hourglass.

Jack Kerouac has been pushing his response to these essential facts since he wrote his cultural icon of a novel, On the Road, at the cusp of the 1950s. (It wouldn’t see publication until 1957.) Dead since 1969, Kerouac maintains a living, throbbing literary identity, his spirit among many that hover barely behind our dead-of-night, ceiling-staring queries:

Is how I’m living worthwhile? Is this how I want to spend my time? What would I be doing,...