Category: The Arts
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I caught “A Complete Unknown,” the movie about Bob Dylan’s emergence as a cultural force, and I’m trying to understand how it is landing so heavily in my own house. My wife, not a Dylanphile at all, has been intrigued for two days now. She has asked me for Spotify playlists that correspond to the…
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I am an artificial intelligence skeptic. That said, I like to see what it does with requests that I think will teach me something about it. So recently when I heard that Philly-based TV shows Abbott Elementary and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia had committed to a joint episode, I thought it provided a chance…
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It looks like a very Oppie year. It’s been a while – like, 4 years – since I felt like I saw enough of the Oscar Best Picture nominees to have an opinion. But this year, I have, and I even saw some of them in theaters. Take that, covid! That said, here are my…
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I’ve seen Jason Isbell — with and without the 400 Unit — 16 times since 2014. And I have to say, he’s never sounded better, more sure of himself and his music, than last week at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, N.J. It’s hard to quantify, because I have seen some great concerts —…
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My wife loves Wes Anderson. A couple of Christmases ago, she got a book about him and his movies. She thinks everything he has done is great — from Bottle Rocket to now. Me? Not so much. I think there is good Wes (Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums, Moonlight Kingdom, Grand Budapest Hotel), bad Wes (The French…
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These are weird times for movies. I don’t know if “going to the movies” is really a thing anymore, and movies now compete with all these TV shows for in-home screen time and attention. Over the last couple years, I just haven’t seen as many of the Oscar contenders as I used to, plus there’s…
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Jason Isbell remains my favorite musician these days, and there’s a lot of energy around him right now. There was a post on a Facebook fan group I enjoy for Isbell about how his wife Amanda Shires was not in the band photo that accompanied the release of the first single for his band’s upcoming…
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I’ve seen most of the Best Picture nominees this year (no Nightmare Alley, Drive My Car or West Side Story) and wanted to drop a quick post on who I think should win this Sunday. Best Picture Power of the Dog There’s a point early in the movie, where Montana simply swallows you as a…
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Virginia and I continued on a torrid pace of movie-watching, this time watching Jerry Maguire with friends on New Year’s Night. One couple had never seen it. I hadn’t seen it in more than a decade, maybe closer to two. Anyway, I reacted to it a little differently than I did back in 1996. Some…
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We continued our movie-watching last night and caught Don’t Look Up, directed by Adam McKay. It is ostensibly about what happens when two scientists (Leo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet heading straight at earth. The movie starts out playing it for laughs, then downshifts into an increasingly frustrated, incredulous satire and pretty dispiriting critique…
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Virginia and I kicked off our quarantine (a nephew we saw over the Christmas weekend tested positive Sunday for covid, so we’re sitting and waiting to see what arises, like so many others) by watching an actual movie, The Power of the Dog, on Netflix. It’s set in mid-1920s Montana, where two brothers (Benedict Cumberbatch,…
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Our local public radio station, WXPN, is a treasure, and their reader poll to determine the greatest albums of all time was a lot of fun. In the end, it became a bit of a Classic Rock Fest and a little hard to listen to, as the Top 10 albums were played in their entirety.…
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