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Little Bears Who Wash
I dreamed this morning that raccoons were in my house. I discovered this while running water for a bath. One had knocked over a dish of cat food and was lounging in the scattered snack tray, picking at...
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Captain Fantastic
One of the few must-see film in theaters this summer was Matt Ross’ Captain Fantastic. A drama about an off-the-grid, beyond-hippie dad whose abilities as a parent are challenged by his wife’s absence...
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Olympic Sadness
No doubt there are many sad kids around the world this weekend, since the Olympics are ending Sunday. The Olympics make me sad too. Sad for the eight-year-old whose heart broke when Waldemar Sierpinski...
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Location Location Location
You don’t write a story based on a location, or do you? I’ll never forget the day I was having bagels with two friends, one a producer and one a director, and talking about story ideas. The producer...
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A Bad Century To Quit Smoking
Anne Roiphe’s essay that appeared in Tablet yesterday, about her late husband’s smoking habit, moved me deeply. Its complete title, “My Husband Quit Smoking, Then He Started Again: And that was fine...
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Crazy Eddie & Jimmy the Greek
Crazy Eddie died last weekend – not the star of the TV commercials I loved as a kid, but Eddie Antar, the founder of the chain of Brooklyn-based electronics stores his iconic commercials advertised....
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Souped-Up Honda Civics
Of all the ridiculous things Ahmad Rahami could get obsessed with, he found souped-up Honda Civics. Until he grew up, that is, and got serious, and thought he’d try his hand at terrorist bombing. “His...
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Slimier Things
Why are dystopian road movies all full of people wearing leather, and yet we never see any cows in them? I’ll never forget Roger Ebert asking Gene Siskel that while reviewing a Road Warrior knockoff in...
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My Donald Trump
The TV event of the year is happening tonight. I’m invited to a viewing party to see it, and have a bottle of party wine picked out (a liter of Italian grenache) and nothing else going on, but still...
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Elevator to the Gallows
Louis Malle was to the French New Wave what the Kinks were to the British Invasion. Though he is not the first name you think of associated with it, nor the second or third, he is clearly of it and did...
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Herr Tamburin Man
Did Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize for literature? A better question might be, “Who is this cabal of Swedes that decides what greatness is?” Me, I don’t know, but on the face of it I suspect he...
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Why I Love Horror Films This Week – and I Hate Horror Films
I’ve never liked horror as a genre, and yet the most timely film in theaters right now is Ouija: Origin of Evil. I came across it at the end of a horror film bender I started a week or so ago. I could...
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The Designated Mourner
“These people, and God knows why, well, they don’t like us. They don’t like us. They simply don’t like us.” That’s Jack from Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner, a film I’ve watched more than once...
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Carefree Highway
Last year around New Years, my wife and I heard Gordon Lightfoot’s “Song For a Winter’s Night” and asked each other, on a lark, “I wonder of he’s still touring.” Within minutes we discovered he’d be...
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The Impermanent Collection
This fall I’ve gone for a few escape days to the Medieval collections of the Metropolitan Museum. With reality TV running the planet, it felt right to connect to something permanent, to the...
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John Montague, Poet from the Land of Poets
The Irish poet John Montague died last weekend, with hardly a peep around here in the place where he was born, Brooklyn. It was Montague and Seamus Heaney, specifically their selections in The Faber...
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Tree of the Wooden Clogs
Seeing The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (L’Albero degli Zoccoli) in a cinema this week was a neorealist sacrament. Ermanno Olmi wrote and directed it, in 1978, using both actors and non-actors, in the...
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Fairytale of New York
This Christmas Day Shane MacGowan turns 59. I wonder if he realized thirty years ago while he was writing the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” (co-written with Jeb Finer) that the saddest Christmas song...
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Toni Erdmann
The movie theater was packed at a matinée of a two and a half-plus hour German comedy. Had me in stitches the whole time. “Stitches”? The whole time? I enjoyed it the whole time, but one of the many...
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Panique
It’s 1947 in a suburban village outside of Paris, and a lonely Jewish photographer named Monsieur Hire (shortened from Hirovitch) patiently endures the gossip and pettiness around him, not seeming to...
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