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First Man
Babylon was one of the few movies ever downvoted on StreamGems. It’s supposed to be streaming recommendations, after all. It wasn’t that Babylon was all THAT bad. There are a lot of worse movies you can stream on any given night. But if, like me, you were a huge fan of Damien Chazelle’s first three…
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What is it About Music that Plucks the Strings of Grief?
Three times in the past few weeks I have found myself in tears. Three times! This is not normal for me; sadness is not my métier. A descent into tears is as unusual for my remorselessly cheerful nature as passing up a good bakery. There are reasons for grief. Reasons good enough that I need…
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You Hurt My Feelings
There is enough likeness in her recent body of work that I feel comfortable describing You Hurt My Feelings as a Julia Louis-Dreyfus kind of movie. It’s smart, adult, funny, mildly acerbic, and deeply rooted in our current problems. These are the kind of problems that people who have nothing but these kinds of problems…
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Wild, Wild Space
As a space junkie, I loved this documentary following two small-launch rocket companies over a multi-year period. Given that Ars Technica’s Rocket Report is part of my weekly diet, I pretty much know how it’s going to turn out and I’m probably THE target audience for a documentary like this. Still, the story arcs of…
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Love’s Labour’s Lost
Perhaps the most flawed of Branagh’s Shakespeare films, Love’s Labour’s Lost is a fitting adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s weaker plays. It’s a silly story and Branagh leans hard into the silliness while transplanting the action into a pre-war (WW2) setting and transforming the play into a Porter and Gershwin jukebox musical. Too much of…
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Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
I won’t pretend this is a movie for everyone. You need to like modern classical music or I suspect you will find this film interminable and probably sleep inducing. But if you check that box, Opus is an intimate private piano recital in your living room. It’s a 1hr 40minute concert with nothing but Sakamoto…
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Remembering Gene Wilder
There is a wonderful story in Remembering Gene Wilder about making The Producers. Brooks worked on it for years before getting it off the ground, and he’d wanted the not-at-all-famous Gene Wilder to be Leo Bloom after seeing him on stage and doing a reading of the first scenes. But when Zero Mostel was cast…
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Inside Out 2
My children grew up with Pixar and they carry with them the natural love we have for the things we cherished when young. But it’s not as if taking my daughters to Pixar movies was some kind of penance. Between 1999 when my first daughter was born and 2010, Pixar produced one of the greatest…
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Rebranding Atheism
A recent essay by Benjamin Cain on Medium got me thinking about something that, to be honest, I don’t spend much time on – religion. Cain’s essay is a convincing takedown of John Vervaeke’s nontheism as a real alternative to atheism. Vervaeke claims that atheists and theist share a common conception of the sacred — a conception…
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Finally, the Election We Deserve
For most of my adult life I, like most Americans, have found myself, as the minute hand nears the top of that great four-year election clock, wondering why we can’t do better. Compared to what the nation seemed capable of, the two politicians chosen for the top job have ranged from wildly disappointing to laughably…
We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational
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