Blood Simple begins with a shot of the Texas landscape and a voiceover. “Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That’s the theory anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here you’re on your own.” Simple is right, if you’re going by plot. A married […]
The first time I saw Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, I recognized it was a beautiful film. One only need to watch Chihiro crossing the creek and see the stream, the way it ripples and moves to understand Miyazaki’s great attention to detail. The visual splendor of Miyazaki’s work has been well-covered. What I didn’t realize until I […]
One of the stories from my youth my Uncle Joe likes to tell is how we were watching The Blob. It must have been sometime in the first three years of my life since my mother and I still lived with my grandmother. The blob had eaten a dog, and my uncle said, “Isn’t that sad, […]
Back in January, when David Bowie died, I mentioned that, although I don’t usually mourn celebrity deaths given I don’t know them, I felt his passing with a keenness I don’t often feel when I hear the famous have passed away. When I was in junior high, I’d recorded a cassette tape off my parents’ […]