Growing up in South Florida, there was the mountainous garbage dump across from the Festival Flea Market in Pompano, and a corridor of car dealerships on both sides of another road, including repair shops, tire places, and other rundown businesses. But never did I see…
The literary equivalent of Washington: Behind Closed Doors is Full Disclosure by William Safire. Each has a cracking good story, but it takes a near-frustrating amount of time to get there, moreso with Behind Closed Doors. That’s Safire and Behind Closed Doors creator David W….
“You are the bicycle.” – Sean Martin Michael Mann’s Collateral, courtesy of cinematographers Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron, is quite possibly the only movie to make nighttime in Los Angeles look haunting, to give it more emotion, more conflict than is usually thought of in…
George Gently is yet another series that Acorn Media uses to make you want to watch more British television and thereby increase their profits. They’re relentless! And they never show their hand like that because of the stiff upper lip they’ve developed from releasing all…
The Story of the Costume Drama moves at the speed of Netflix. In the brief few seconds it takes to put an interesting costume drama in your queue, the five-episode series has moved on to another clip, with another piece of British costume drama history…
In Israel, the world is always falling apart. Qassam rockets bombard the town of Sderot. The radio repeats an interview with a little boy whose backyard is laden with a few of them. A solemn commentator voice claims that there’s a way to give these…
Here is a documentary that’s at times so unsettling, so frightening, that you believe it can’t possibly be true. But it is. And it’s us. Our political discourse has become so fractured and so dysfunctional that, as Ken Rudin, NPR political commentator, puts it, “People…
Father Dowling Mysteries: The Second Season is pleasantly boring, many steps up from what boring usually is, but not by much. Tom Bosley, always well regarded for Happy Days, plays Father Frank Dowling, a great force of good in his Chicago Catholic church, who works…
The Fairy is a meditation on deadpan comedy, as involved as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies, but much slower-paced. This is of benefit to those who are curious about every element of what it takes to make that kind of comedy, the movements, the…
Tyler Perry strikes me as an insecure filmmaker, like he’s worried that tomorrow will come and everything he’s worked for will disappear, so today he has to build more and more as a wall to keep that possibility of loss out. This, even though he’s…