“I’ve had no hankering to rewatch Cast Away for the same reasons you won’t catch me taking another look at Contagion. Yet this grim week I found myself drawn to two stark, cinematic portraits of isolation. Gus Van Sant’s Last Days and Robert Altman’s Secret Honor are fictionalized riffs on famous figures, speculating about their darkest hours at home, alone.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/29/2020
“I thought I’d run out of patience with the international improv shenanigans of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. And yet somehow The Trip To Greece sat better with me than their previous couple of pictures, which I guess is either a testament to me being worn down by repetition or just the strange circumstances under which the film has been released.” – North Shore Movies, 05/29/2020
On The ARTery Living Room Livestream I sat down for a virtual chat with my old friend Ed Siegel to discuss Joan Micklin Silver’s great 1977 Boston newspaper comedy Between The Lines, our experiences starting out at alt-weeklies much like the one depicted in the movie and why this film still feels relevant more than forty years later. – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/22/2020
“The Night of the Hunter’s high contrast black-and-white imagery is a deliberate throwback to silent film expressionism, while the tacky day-glo colors of Freeway are straight from tabloid television. The films have seemingly opposite aspirations, yet both are stories about a child’s ability to abide and endure, especially when the wolves are at the door.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/22/2020
“Ultimately it’s about how art can change people’s lives for better and worse, altering our perspectives of ourselves and the world around us. But it’s also about how such work isn’t created in a vacuum. The film’s note-perfect final shot illuminates the symbiotic relationship between the artist and the admirers, the seers and the seen, the painters and the thieves.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/21/2020
“Altman’s California Split and Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack have long dwelled in the back alleys of their directors’ filmographies, movies more written about than seen, boasting an ardent band of acolytes. In a way this seems somehow appropriate, as they’re modestly scaled pictures about men living on the margins, hustlers scraping by from score to score.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/15/2020
“I developed a weird, contrarian’s affection for the ugliness of this movie. Hardy could so easily be a heartthrob but instead he’s a Mickey Rourke waiting to happen, and in Capone he’s finally found a role that allows him to bleat incoherently like an addled Popeye the Sailor Man while noisily shitting his pants onscreen not once, but twice.” – North Shore Movies, 05/15/2020
“But life doesn’t really work that way, and most friendships don’t end so much as they just fade away. As you get older people disappear from your life so gradually sometimes you don’t even notice until they’re gone, and writer-director Dan Sallitt’s Fourteen is a movie about a close friendship’s slow dissolve over years that seem to pass in a blink.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/14/2020
“Too square to be critical favorites and too modest to make much of a ruckus otherwise, Danny Collins and Ricki And The Flash are wistfully funny movies about taking your last chance to fix what’s broken in the rearview, featuring deliciously oversized star turns by two of our finest. There were better films I saw that year but few I’ve returned to as often.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/08/2020
“This is a film about how a tiny gesture can make a huge difference to people during a difficult time, and how the most minuscule things sometimes mean the world. Delicately directed by the young filmmaker Andrew Ahn, it’s a movie about neighbors that’s also about what it means to be a neighbor. And it somehow does all of this without ever raising its voice.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/07/2020
SPLICED PERSONALITY 