Dragged Across Concrete ~ This was one of the most suspenseful — almost unbearably so — cop movies I’ve seen since The French Connection. And blessed with a soundtrack that, while it doesn’t surpass Don Ellis‘ seminal work on that quintessential 70’s film, did reignite my interest in the O’Jays …
Covid19 has disrupted everything in life. Perhaps the only area in which I’m fortunate is I didn’t lose my job like millions of other Americans who were forced out of work by the lockdowns. I’ve been working from home for 6 weeks (that policy has been extended 4 times, the …
May 2 ~ I guess I should consider myself fortunate: 6 years ago I left the gig economy and took a fulltime job with a Fortune 1000 company that has now become — via merger — a Fortune 500 company, doing what I’ve done for the last 35+ years: write …
The Laundromat ~ I can’t tell yet if it’s because Steven Soderbergh is such a talented director that he brings out the best in his cast, or whether it’s because top talent like Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas and Meryl Streep, freed of hype machine and blockbuster expectations (although a nominee …
A daily ritual in place for years now is fetching the latest deliveries from the US post office and taking them to a receptacle set up in the garage. As I sift through them, a good percentage — 95% or higher — go directly into the trash: sales pitches I …
Watching (and rewatching) an inordinate number of films since Covid-19 proved the pin to burst the latest economic bubble. First, the most recent releases: Knives Out ~ Starts out as an intriguing whodunnit chock-a-block with twists, false leads, side plots and a rogue’s gallery of characters with plenty of motive …
I owe Esther Williams an apology but unfortunately I’m seven years too late to deliver it (she died in her sleep at the venerable age of 91 in 2013). On the few occasions I caught her show-biz aquatic act from clips of her at-the-time blockbuster movies — Neptune’s Daughter, On …
Growing up we Boomers witnessed the advent of television while being weaned on movies that presented a simplistic, almost childlike, image of what frontier life was like in the American West. The lines were starkly drawn: there were White Hats (the good guys), Black Hats (the bad guys), a saloon …
The Eighties and Nineties saw a frenzy of prosecutions across the country of day care center operators accused of sexually abusing children in their care, the most infamous being the McMartin family of Manhattan Beach, California. In a 2003 book I just ran across in a thrift store, No Crueler …
In recent years, I’m drawn to stories of self-sacrifice and grace under pressure (as the author whose name inspired this site defined courage), most markedly when revealed in time of war. The military nurses whose story is now preserved for the ages in We Band of Angels by Elizabeth Norman …
