Reading Time: 9 minutes Take a break and have fun with some more puzzles
Entertainment
Posted inHealth
What we can learn from Selma Blair’s departure from Dancing with the Stars
Reading Time: 5 minutes I didn’t know that Selma Blair, who has been very open about her multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis, was on Dancing With the Stars, so I was surprised when I heard that doctors had advised her not to continue appearing after being on the dance floor for four weeks. It’s not that I was surprised she […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Review: ‘Strawberry Mansion’ an imaginative delight
Reading Time: 2 minutes Upon finishing the charmingly lo-fi Strawberry Mansion, which I and much of the rest of society missed this past February (it earned a little over $97 thousand at the box office), I went into one of those semi-deranged Google search death spirals, so vexed by the memory of some reminiscent genre-bending pastiche. The movie in […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Christian show ‘The Chosen’ vandalizes its own billboards to generate buzz
Reading Time: 4 minutes In an attempt to portray themselves as better than other forms of faith-based media, the producers of a new Christian TV show engaged in the most stereotypically evangelical scheme ever: They depicted themselves as victims of persecution when no such thing was actually happening. The show is The Chosen, which generated plenty of (earned) media […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Review: Oscar hopeful ‘Belfast’ offers a wistful look at a grim period
Reading Time: 2 minutes There’s this incredible moment in Conor McPherson’s low-key horror flick The Eclipse that finds Ciarán Hinds’s melancholic widower driving alone at night, lost in thought, when he’s suddenly visited by the not-yet ghost of his dying father-in-law sitting in the front passenger seat, the soundtrack’s chorus segueing from soothing to bloodcurdling, causing a startled Hinds […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Review: ‘Student Body’ easily wiped from memory
Reading Time: 2 minutes I can’t get over the chalkboard. Student Body (no relation to 1981’s Student Bodies), is a low-budget Breakfast Club slasher riff, set in a fictitious, present-day (they use smartphones!) prep school. Early in the film, brainy yet mortally shy Jane (Montse Hernandez, destined for better things) is put on the spot by her sadistic math […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Review: Woody Allen’s ‘Rifkin’s Festival’ is a depressing exercise in nostalgia
Reading Time: 2 minutes Woody Allen’s latest film Rifkin’s Festival would have completely escaped my notice were it not for Will Sloan’s gleeful description of official Rifkin’s Festival tie-in NFTs (non-fungible token) on the Michael and Us podcast. The film, about the existential/marital crisis of a retired Film Studies professor, is among the unlikeliest candidates imaginable for blockchain gimmickry. […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Review: ‘They Say Nothing Stays the Same’ adrift on the small screen
Reading Time: 2 minutes For decades, theatrical exhibition has been synonymous with tent-pole event movies, with smaller films typically relegated to the home video/streaming sphere. But my viewing of They Say Nothing Stays the Same (hereafter They Say) would have dramatically benefited from a theatrical screening, not so I might better soak in its impressionist panoramas (lovely as they […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Review: ‘Ema’ takes a cinematic flamethrower to the status quo
Reading Time: 2 minutes Martin Scorsese recently published an editorial in the Los Angeles Times urging readers to go watch Guillermo del Toro’s stylish Nightmare Alley (currently in theaters, including a black and white version; available on Hulu and HBO Max starting February 1). I was lukewarm on it but nonetheless saddened by its underwhelming box office against that […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Review: ‘The Mitchells vs. the Machines’ brings meme culture to mainstream
Reading Time: 3 minutes Sony Pictures Animation is quickly becoming a dark horse favorite in the typically risk-averse realm of mainstream American animation. Lacking the pedigree of Disney/Pixar and overwhelming magnitude of Katzenbergian stunt casting at DreamWorks Animation, Sony has nonetheless housed talented weirdos like comedy duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs), formalist […]