Normal People. Element Pictures / BBC / Hulu, 2020, 12 episodes, ~30 minutes each. Directed by Lennie Abrahamson & Hettie Macdonald. Written by Alice Birch, Mark O’Rowe, and Sally Rooney. Shot by Suzie Lavelle and Kate McCullough. Scored by Stephen Rennicks. Edited by Nathan Nugent and Stephen O’Connell. Starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. These Read More
Widows. 20th Century Fox, 2018, 129 minutes. Directed by Steve McQueen. Written by Steve McQueen & Gillian Flynn. Shot by Sean Bobbitt. Scored by Hans Zimmer. Edited by Sean Walker. Starring Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, Cynthia Erivo, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Colin Farrell, Robert Duvall, Lucas Haas, and Liam Neeson. Spoilers, if you Read More
I scored a few inches in the Voice‘s “Best of Civic Life 2016” a while back, but my favorite two bits didn’t make the final cut. Which is what this is for. Enjoy? Best Raid You could almost feel the saliva dripping from the tabloids’ pages: the “gangbangers” “ruled the Bronx streets with an iron Read More
THE SUITCASE Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first: What’s in the damn suitcase?
So now that the good people of Iowa have gone to the polls, or whatever it is exactly they do at their caucuses, and begun to draw our long national nightmare to a close, you mighta thought they’d have managed to thin the herd a bit. Sure, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum fell to the Read More
The Film Forum is screening the Coens’ True Grit this weekend, so I dredged up this essay I wrote but never found a home for back when it was in theaters. The first cinematic take on True Grit was released in ’69, the same year Butch & Sundance and The Wild Bunch exploded into Read More
Dark Star (1974). As film school sci-fi goes, THX 1138 (’71!) remains the reigning champion, but cross-splicing Strangelove (’64), 2001 (’68), and The Prisoner (’67) is inspired. Space as job. Hard not to see that as O’Bannon’s DNA, particularly given the modest debts the first two Alien films owe this one. Carpenter’s might seem harder Read More
I’m a news junkie. It’s a legit issue, I should go to meetings (“Hello, my name is Nick…”), but I don’t have time because I have news to read. One of the ways I cope with the deluge of news/indulge my compulsion is to make liberal use of the function in the NYT‘s app that Read More
Damn near every paragraph of this Jon Lee Anderson piece on Libya for The New Yorker is dubious: The wars in Syria and Iraq continue to dominate international headlines, Interesting to cast the turmoil in the region as separate “wars.” I think IS would disagree. But that’s beside the point, moving on…
It was always going to end this way. Time after time he would come to their rescue; he was protecting them, they were helpless without him; he was avenging their defiled honor, redeeming his own vitiated masculinity (the appeal of this for the white male demo as morning broke across America). He would endure humiliations, Read More