Today I'm writing out of market ambition. I want you to buy Alonso's new book, the revised and expanded edition of Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas, in which he writes about a film from 2024, Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, one that didn&
This is not a review. It can’t be. When you’re a film critic and you become friends with a filmmaker, the best you can do is help promote their work if you think their projects are worth it. And Dave Markey, the director of The Secret Lives of
Quick one today. (Oh, and by the way, the photo accompanying this little post, a picture provided by my friend Thor, has absolutely nothing to do with anything that follows. Sharing a picture of the offending party would be pointless and unpleasant. Why not some cotton candy instead?) Kim Davis
The British food company Lyle’s – makers of baking pantry staples like golden syrup and black treacle – has a very old, very cool illustration on its labels. It’s a decomposing lion in which bees have made a hive. It’s from a Bible story where Samson eats honey from
I want to apologize before I start. I spoiled the story with the title, and I've misled you into thinking this was going to be about Katherine Heigl vaping. It's not. I just think it's an enjoyable picture of a celebrity taking a moment
On Good Morning America, right now, as I sit at the dining room table and look across the room at the television, there’s a man and woman, I don’t know their names but the guy has one of those faces where your first thought is, “I gotta remember
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
I took that photo with my shitty iPhone 8. People laugh at me when I tell them that's still my level of phone but I don't care. It functions mostly. Anyway, the tomato. It's from my local farmer's market. Not THE farmer&
INHERENT VICE (2014) A title card in Inherent Vice references graffiti from a Paris wall in May of 1968, when French student and worker protests announced a social revolution there. That slogan — “Under the pavingstones, the beach!” — is about two forces pushing against one another, the cement on top eventually
7 Walks with Mark Brown is a documentary about French plants and the paleobotanist who loves them, and when I describe it that simply to friends, sometimes their eyes glaze over and they say something deadly like, “Oh… well, I guess that sounds nice.” 7 Walks is, of course, more
I woke up to a text from a friend letting me know that Radu Jude's latest film, Dracula, opens at the end of October. I admire Jude's films – his exuberantly long titles alone make me pretty happy: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn; I Do Not
has nothing directly to do with what I'm writing about today. I just really enjoy Dr. Pepper and I couldn't find a decent picture to represent anything else.* I don’t often watch the Emmy Awards. I never know when they’re taking place. And because
There’s a terrible Google commercial featuring 26-year-old “Ted” asking Google AI to find him, very specifically, a “cool” music activity in his city that still gets him home at a reasonable hour. This Ted person is allegedly 26 years old. And cares about being home at a reasonable hour.