In 1983, my mother and stepfather were laid off from their jobs at exactly the same time. We were living in Hobbs, a small town in southeastern New Mexico close to the Texas border, and the town’s recent oil boom was slowing down at a rapid pace. My mother
I'm a fall risk. My surgeon says I'm past that phase. I think he's both right and wrong. I live in fear of crashing to the ground. I'm a large man with two recently installed (Nov 2023/July 2024) hips. They work
My internet life occasionally involves walking into a silly maze of pop culture associations for no good reason. Yesterday on Bluesky my pal April posted about a song she liked from her childhood in 1989. I thought, "I, too, like this song." Then I went to listen to
Quick one today. I'm home from Atlanta, where one of our nieces got married to a good dude. I nearly had a hip disaster on the dance floor at the reception. More on that later. Today I need to tell you how to do something for Halloween. I
Romanian filmmaking doesn’t make deep inroads into the United States. Cristian Mungiu’s deadly serious and award-winning 2007 drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is probably the most well-known of all the Romanian imports that have shown up in American arthouses over the past few decades. Radu
[NOTE: All archive reviews were published previously in print or on the internet for outlets that used to employ me. Every so often I'll be posting them here to give them another go.] HELLRAISER (2022) Pity the poor monsters of legendary horror movie franchises: Time and familiarity and
I still have an iPod. The last time it was updated was, I’m guessing, 2010 or so, not long before Apple purged my iTunes without any warning. One day I had 29,000+ songs in my files. The next day about 60% of that. Music I had purchased online,
La Pochette brand cigarette pouch, made from 100% leatherette and 14K Goldelle, tagline: “You kids KNOCK IT OFF!” This is an ad from Programme 4, a world outside of both time and place. The product, La Pochette, never existed. Also, in 1972, my mom owned one. She smoked Tareytons. She
I wrote a silly little book once – out of print, who cares – and in that silly little book I documented a moment when I was expected to review a film based on seeing it at its premiere. Sometimes they do this to you: no press screening, it's just
"Barrie Chase is here," I said to friend and neighbor Gary Cotti. The name didn't immediately click for him. So I whispered, "Mutual, I'm sure." "WHAT?! WHERE?!" He didn't yell, but his response was emphatic and warrants all-caps.
Two novels about unhappy priests by Georges Bernanos: The Diary of a Country Priest (1936), about a young priest in a rural French village whose physical frailty from encroaching stomach cancer parallels the diminished faith of his parishioners. He can't pray or sleep or eat, and despairs over
I have built a subjective scale of Christmas mania and appointed myself as arbiter of truth. A simple 1 to 10, where 1 is you tolerate the holiday, 5 is you like it like a normal person, 10 is you might have actually lost your mind for it. I have