Dormant Last read · last published · next check
Read 16 hours ago and current, but nothing has been published for 17 months.
The great faces of cinema are sometimes stagnant. They barely move, they never shift even after they no longer inhabit our great earth. They live on in celluloid untouched by time, a representation of the divine work at play in the singular creation of each of us. Sometimes these faces are so singular they become the actors signature, almost the reason for hire, the character of the character.…
I once told a friend that if I tried to write about Gene Hackman, I feared I might never stop…I guess today I must put that then hypothetical to its test. Hackman at the very ripe and towering age of 95 years has died ending a towering career in what seems to be very mysterious causes despite his age when factoring in the death of his wife, and strangely enough, his dog. It is a rather abrupt and…
I don't remember the first time I watched “Enter the Dragon”. I don't remember the first time I saw Bruce Lee or Jim Kelly either. These things exist in my mind as if they always existed, as if I had no choice over the amount of real estate they occupy on my head. I do however remember the feeling of first seeing each one, and in this particular case, in this particular month I want to celebrate…
Carmen Jones. Dorothy Dandridge. The two names even and into themselves cause a commotion in the fused atoms that mark my being. I consider the two women inseperable, inextricable from one another. Co-creators of one another, neither as we have come to know them would exist without the other. Based on a play by Georges Bizet and directed by the renowned Otto Preminger (Laura, The Man with the…
A random encounter that leads to a love supreme, romance, hard won by way of the fires of jealousy, chauvinist chivalry, violence, female rage, and bull**** -That’s the cut and dry of Tony Scott and Tarantino’s 1993 vivid fever dream of mayhem for love “True Romance”. A movie so nonsensical, it only makes sense when you understand that that is its intention. This is a modern fairytale. It’s a…
It starts with a “clang”. A vibrating crystal trumpet announcing the moment. It was built to perfection- in episode, and in season. There were many times that though I had a clue as to possibilities, I wondered out loud why in particular Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) bared her proverbial teeth to Oswald Cobb seemingly in perpetuity. Clues were dropped, a big one being the mention and discussion…
“It's is the man himself, look, he's grown young!”. It's a line reading engraved in my memory owing to the severity of its anachronistic delivery by one Keanu Reeves, and a microcosmic example of the wide spread belief that Keanu Reeves was horribly miscast in Francis Ford Coppola's classic adaptation of Bram Stoker's “Dracula”. While I too patroned this church for some time, the more viewings…
She was very easy to let into your home, that is the first thing I would say about Shelley Duvall. Waifish, tall, spindly, with a voice that perpetually shivered in a broken falsetto, and two perfect camera apertures in the middle of her face - she carried with her the presence of something eternal, and yet fragile enough that if you were to touch her she might disappear into the fog of your…
When I was young - somewhere under ten and above five (I don't quite recall) I was in our church’s Nativity Play. I was set to be one of the three wise men, I don't remember much before or after, just that when I arrived on stage I could not see the north star, but rather a sea of penetrative eyes staring at me, waiting on me to “become” and I was afraid, afraid like I've never remember being…
From the moment you she entered the screen in the “No Regrets for Our Youth”, I knew she was the star. I didn't know her face well enough to know she was Setsuko Hara, but I knew she was Setsuko because her energy told me so. The story of a woman looking for purpose who finds it not in struggle, but during it. Who finds love not in labor, but in commitment to the ideas that drive it, becomes…
