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Bombast #94
I have a recurring dream—not an uncommon one, I’ve gathered—in which I’m forced to go back to high school. A clerical error is discovered, some minor oversight, and it turns out I was a few credit...
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Bombast #62
Can you smell the cannonades? A long-fomenting revolution is underway! Movies are going to be fun again! Was the Lexington moment when Dan Kois pushed away a steaming plateful of cultural...
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Bombast #95
The Internet has many uses, and foremost among these is providing multiple forums for people to register their flummoxed, spluttering indignence about one thing or another. Most of the outrage seems...
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Bombast #96
What is Vulgar Auteurism? If a May 24 primer in the Voice Media Group’s New York City paper is any indication, it’s a shameless attention grab. A critical tool of any use? Not so much. Yet all the...
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New Column: The Classical
Over the last week I have been planning to write this first blog post on the subject of repertory moviegoing and new/old DVD releases, a weekly missive whose style will, hopefully, fall somewhere...
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The Classical #5
“May I trouble you to Turn Off the Dark, please?” The conversation between live and filmed theater, which began at least as early as 1896 with May Irwin and John Rice performing their liplock from...
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The Classical #6
It is a somewhat common tendency of those who’ve grown up gawping at movies to be drawn back, time and again, to their first flush of attraction, as though looking for a clue to the present...
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The Classical #7
People often ask me, “Is the jet-setting life of a third-tier film critic as glamorous as I, a timecard-punching third-shift drone at the tonenail-clipper factory, imagine it to be?” The answer,...
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The Classical #8
I saw every single movie in theatrical wide release between 1996 and 1999. This has not been true of any other period of my life. The factors influencing this remarkable accomplishment are not...
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The Classical #9
It is no secret that everything I do is for the children, and therefore it’s unsurprising that I recently found myself talking to a classroom of MFA students about the sweet science of film criticism....
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The Classical #10
From 2003 to 2004, I was an employee of New York’s Kim’s Video franchise at its Ave. A, East Village outpost—the mini-chain’s original non-Laundromat storefront. Upon being shuttered, this is the...
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The Classical #15
As I grow older—and this seems to just keep happening—I find that there’s very little that interests me so much in art and in life as paradox, those quandaries which can never quite be worked through,...
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The usually stone-cold hearts of American movie critics have been softened and set all aflutter by Martin Scorsese’s love letter to early cinema disguised as tyke gone wild adventure Hugo. We haven’t...
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The Classical #18: A User’s Guide to Proper Taste
Some people have perfect pitch. But though the stanzas of each week’s Classical undoubtedly soar, I myself cannot sing a note–yet I have been gifted with something rarer still: Perfect taste. I would...
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Bombast #32
I’ve been meaning to do something with this for a couple of weeks. It’s a video from something called the Knockout Network featuring a young woman named “Vivian Kellie.” She is identified as a “sexy...
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Bombast #36
Criticism of all stripes, the personal essay, the feuilleton, and the knock-knock joke are all dead as Dillinger: this is a given. But for those of us whose sole desire is to be “in the arts” without...
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Bombast #37
I have, just today, been getting myself up to speed with the last year’s discussion of the state of cinephilia, beginning with Nico Baumbach’s “All That Heaven Allows: What Is, Or Was, Cinephilia?” in...
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Bombast #45
To my great regret, last weekend I missed a showing of Ishirō Honda’s Mothra at the Journal Square Loew’s in Jersey City, New Jersey. In part, my disappointment stems from the fact that the movie is a...
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Bombast #46
Andrew Sarris died this week. My father got the news before I did, which means it was news. When I checked my e-mail upon emerging from a screening of a just-irredeemably-awful movie on Wednesday,...
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Bombast #47
I would like to begin this week with a moment of silence for Emi Ito of The Peanuts, whose performances in the Mothra films I spoke of fondly only two columns ago. It was in revisiting Ms. Ito’s...
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