Some films catch you right up and hold you close from the opening scenes in a kind of intimate, magic-of-the-movies sense, the outside world gone gently incommunicado as you settle into something resembling a trance state, putty in the hands of the film’s creative team and the alternate—or in some cases, more real than “real”— universe they are bringing to life in front of you. Director Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams,” based on the 2011 novella of the same title by Denis Johnson, is one such film. For his third feature film, Bentley offers up an intensely personal portrait of one…
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In the idyll of a mid-summer Sunday, a middle-aged man in the ostensible prime of life, with four daughters at home in a WASPY and affluent northeastern burg, lounges in a friend’s pool with his wife and a few others, fresh from an invigorating swim. One hand dangles in the water and another, portentously, is “around a glass of gin.” (The group is nursing hangovers.) In one of those slightly whacky creative inspirations that at the very least will give him a good story to share at the next of what we are soon given to understand are regular cocktail…
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Here are the first two sentences of Charles Van Doren’s biography in Wikipedia: Charles Lincoln Van Doren (February 12, 1926 – April 9, 2019), was an American writer and editor who was involved in a television quiz show scandal in the 1950s. In 1959 he testified before the United States Congress that he had been given the correct answers by the producers of the NBC quiz show Twenty-One. After the third sentence describing his subsequent career as a writer of multiple books and an editor for the “Encyclopedia Britannica,” the fourth sentence under the heading of Background reads: Charles Van Doren was born in New York City, the…
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Barrington Jedidiah Walker has been eyeing a climb up a very tall mountain for a very long time. Dream as he might about someday grinning down from its peak and beholding the rewards of his ascent, he remains stuck at his low-elevation base camp, where swirling clouds and the clamor of civilization and its entanglements below freeze him in place, unable to carry on. He explains his lack of progress to himself as just a long spell of not-quite-right timing. Surely, he tells his closest, life-long confidant who has been a regular, supportive visitor with Barrington as they gaze at…
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Historians hail Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press circa 1440 as a seminal shift in human civilization, and so it has been. It would take another nearly four centuries, until 1826, before Nicéphore Niépce captured “View from the Window at Le Gras” via a “heliotrope” process that has been immortalized as the world’s first photograph. Parlor game enthusiasts might argue these centuries later about whether Niépce’s picture was worth more or less than any proverbial thousand words set to type by Gutenberg. But what we have learned as we creep up on the 200th anniversary of Niépce’s accomplishment is that…