These pictures are from the National Geographic Photography Contest 2010. A taste. Check out all the pictures here.
Sidney Lumet died last weekend. Looking through his credits, I saw that he had directed “Network“. I watched it last night for the first time in decades and loved the way it played. I don’t know if Sidney Lumet was a great director, but he was pretty good. He was a former actor and that [...]
I saw two crime related movies recently. ”The Town” and “Gomorrah”. The first movie is the second directorial effort from Ben Affleck. He wrote and stars in the movie also. I don’t know how much of the movie he actually directed, because many of the action scenes are quiet involved and speak either to a [...]
I watched “Places in the Heart”, the Robert Benton movie which got Sally Field a Oscar. Robert Benton wrote and directed it. His camera direction is just what I want from camera direcction: nothing. It is there, but you don’t know it. That comes from the way the location is set. The scenes are set [...]
I was writing a note to someone, iTunes had been playing Bach, and this song came on. The aching beauty of it grabbed me. Wynton Marsalis, Yesterdays, Standard Time, Volume 3
I’m listening to Jakob Dylan’s album, Seeing Things. Up On The Mountain, in part: Oh, here it comes and there it goes The unbearable sound of the earth making men out of boys First you learn and then you’ll teach About that bright, bright light Making its way On up the mountain night and day [...]
I saw Avatar with Bookzilla and JMan on Christmas. There were some really small kids in the theater. There was a level of action in this movie that I don’t think is appropriate for very small children. After leaving the theater, I wanted to talk about the movie alot. Not that there is a lot [...]
I watched this with the kids last night and we talked about it afterward. The movie is a fictionalized account of drug raids in Texas that targeted black people living in housing projects. The drug raids were based on the testimony of a single informant. The criminal case fell apart and one woman, at the [...]
Atom Egoyan’s movie, Adoration, has a lot in common with the scripts I have written where, half way through, I would throw them away, thinking that no one would want to watch that particular pile of convoluted, narcissistic crap. This movie isn’t a bad movie. But I’ll never get those two hours back.
Vic Chestnutt died. He was in a coma after having taken on overdose of muscle relaxants. The NY Times obituary didn’t say if the overdose was purposeful or accidental. I’m thinking that it was probably more the former than the latter. Mr. Chesnutt had a cracked, small voice but sang with disarming candor about a [...]