Screen
Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar channel Jack Kerouac’s thesis
I remember my first experience with Jack Kerouac. I was on a classic literature binge; the more risqué, the better. I was in the midst of reading everything I could afford with my mangled selection of bills and picked up a copy of On the Road. All I knew about the ...
Something to do with death
No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will...
Slow-mo Poirot
Whether you find the latest adaptation of the Agatha Christie classic, Murder on the Orient Express, “deliberate” or “boring” hinges entirely on the delight...
Sinful and sorrowful
The
Irishman begins in darkness. A small box of light at the center of
the frame opens like an iris, and we see nurses and doctors....
The poetry of cinema
Though an obscure class or two on film studies or screenwriting sometimes appears on the course list at Naropa University, the Buddhist-inspired Boulder school has no film studies major. However, since 1999, Naropa has enjoyed the presence of the novelist, singer-...
‘We were there’
"Hollywood cinema has had a complicated relationship with race and ethnicity since its very beginning,” says Luis I. Reyes at the beginning of his...
A history of violence
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion ... I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do...
Blue screens of death
Every few years, somebody gets a weird bug up their ass to make a movie that doesn’t look like a movie, from Hardcore Henry,...
Hardly dying
John McClane (Bruce Willis), the hyper-violent man perpetually wrong in place and time, has always been Rambo by way of “grumpy cat.” The only thing that makes Die Hard actually Die Hard is the surly sense of humor McClane spouts while committing copious homicides. ...
Imbued with poetry, hindered by commerce
Originally published in 1923, The Prophet by Lebanese-American author Kahlil Gibran, is one of the most successful and popular books of poetry every produced. Selling more than 100 million copies in more than 40 languages, The Prophet is a collection of 26 ...
