Category: movies
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The Whale: A Lot of Emotional Blubber
Plot via IMDB: Idaho, 2016. Scarred by the profound wounds of grief and guilt, couchbound Charlie, an online writing instructor living with chronic obesity, now has a crystal-clear view of his secret intentions. And confined to his claustrophobic and musty apartment, the self-destructive shut-in has all the time in the world to contemplate the damaging…
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Violent Night: This Is One Die-Hardened Santa
Plot via IMDB: When a team of mercenaries breaks into a wealthy family compound on Christmas Eve, taking everyone inside hostage, the team isn’t prepared for a surprise combatant: Santa Claus is on the grounds, and he’s about to show why this Nick is no saint I’m one of those film fans that thinks Die…
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The Good Nurse: Meds and Murder on the Side
Plot via IMDB: Amy, a compassionate nurse and single mother struggling with a life-threatening heart condition, is stretched to her physical and emotional limits by the hard and demanding night shifts at the ICU. But help arrives when Charlie, a thoughtful and empathetic fellow nurse, starts at her unit. While sharing long nights at the…
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Puss in Boots- The Last Wish: Knowing the Last Cat Life Is Not Really the Final Curtain Call
Plot via IMDB: Sadly, Puss in Boots, the undaunted Spanish lover and hero, is now down to the last of his nine lives, a decade after the events of Puss in Boots (2011). And as if that weren’t enough, the unstoppable bounty hunter known as The Big Bad Wolf is after him. To restore all…
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Babylon: Unable to Get Past the Partying into the Art of Moviemaking
Plot via IMDB; An original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles led by Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva, with an ensemble cast including Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li and Jean Smart. A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled…
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We Have a Ghost: Going Beyond Spooky
Plot via IMDB: Seeking a fresh start in Chicago, the Presley family moves into a dusty fixer-upper they soon realize comes with a catch: a ghost in the attic named Ernest (David Harbour). Despite Ernest’s attempts at scaring teenage son Kevin (Jahi Winston), the detached, music-obsessed teen soon finds a kindred spirit in this trapped…
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Creed III: Rocky All the Way
Plot via IMDB: After dominating the boxing world, Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) has been thriving in both his career and family life. When childhood friend and former boxing prodigy Damian (Jonathan Majors) resurfaces after serving a long sentence in prison, he is eager to prove that he deserves his shot in the ring. The…
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Bardo: A False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths- Getting Caught in Self Deception’s Indulgent Purgatory
Plot via IMDB: Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is an epic, visually stunning and immersive experience set against the intimate and moving journey of Silverio, a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles, who, after being named the recipient of a prestigious international award, is compelled to return to…
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Triangle of Sadness: Going Just a Little Beyond Gilligan’s Island
Plot via IMDB: In Ruben Östlund’s wickedly funny Palme d’Or winner, social hierarchy is turned upside down, revealing the tawdry relationship between power and beauty. Celebrity model couple, Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), are invited on a luxury cruise for the uber-rich, helmed by an unhinged boat captain (Woody Harrelson). What first appeared…
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Megan: Just Another Grizzly American Girl Doll
Plot via IMDB: When Gemma suddenly becomes the caretaker of her orphaned 8-year-old niece, Cady, Gemma’s unsure and unprepared to be a parent. Under intense pressure at work, Gemma decides to pair her M3GAN prototype with Cady in an attempt to resolve both problems-a decision that will have unimaginable consequences When you’re a robot engineer…
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Cocaine Bear: Zonked Out More than the Average Bear
Plot via IMDB: Inspired by the 1985 true story of a drug runner’s plane crash, missing cocaine, and the black bear that ate it, this wild dark comedy finds an oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists and teens converging in a Georgia forest where a 500-pound apex predator has ingested a staggering amount of cocaine…
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Eo: Transfiguring the Suffering of Every Living Thing
Plot via IMDB: The world is a mysterious place when seen through the eyes of an animal. EO, a grey donkey with melancholic eyes, meets good and bad people on his life’s path, experiences joy and pain, endures the wheel of fortune randomly turn his luck into disaster and his despair into unexpected bliss. But…
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Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania— Getting Tinier and Tinier Until It Hardly Even Matters
Plot via IMDB: Scott Lang and Hope Van Dyne, along with Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne, explore the Quantum Realm, where they interact with strange creatures and embark on an adventure that goes beyond the limits of what they thought was possible. It’s a cinematic truism that if a character says “It’s never over,”…
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Blonde: Going too Far Up the Skirt of the Blonde Dream
Plot via IMDB: From director Andrew Dominik, and based on the bestselling novel by Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Blonde’ boldly reimagines the life of one of Hollywood’s most enduring icons, Marilyn Monroe. From her volatile childhood as Norma Jeane, through her rise to stardom and romantic entanglements, ‘Blonde’ blurs the lines of fact and fiction to…
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Lyle, Lyle Crocodile: Hoping and Bopping to that Crocodile Rock
Plot via IMDB: Follows the title reptile who lives in a house on East 88th Street in New York City. Lyle enjoys helping the Primm family with everyday chores and playing with the neighborhood kids but one neighbor insists that Lyle belongs in a zoo. Mr. Grumps and his cat, Loretta, do not like crocodiles,…
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Tar: Going Beyond the Counterpoint and Dissonances
Plot via IMDB: Women at the height of their powers and prestige can fall and be corrupted just as easily as men. That is the premise of Tar, a film directed by Todd Field and starring Cate Blanchett, as a woman who is the conductor of the most prestigious orchestra in the world, the Berlin…
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Empire of Light: Living Within the Flickering Light
Plot via IMDB: Hilary (Olivia Colman) is a cinema manager struggling with her mental health, and Stephen (Micheal Ward) is a new employee longing to escape the provincial town where he faces daily adversity. Together they find a sense of belonging and experience the healing power of music, cinema, and community. Empire of Light takes…
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Be Anita and Not Maria from Westside Story
All the Puerto Rican girls from my neighborhood, way back in the early 1960’s wanted to be Anitafrom West Side Story- a chica, with caliente legs,red Cutex lips, golden earrings and suave dance moves.To be Maria, the heroine, was to be their mothers—boring, white dresses and crucifixes, Ave Maria’s tied up in a simple demure…
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To Leslie: An Honest and Worthy Oscar Performance of One Person’s Sobriety Journey
Plot via IMDB: Having squandered every single dime of her lottery winnings on liquor and drugs, defeated West Texas single mother Leslie Rowlands finds her way back home six years after the life-altering event. But now the money is gone, the already few friends are lost, and her long-suffering family has moved on with their…
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Women Talking: Getting to Exodus
Plot via IMDB Do nothing. Stay and fight. Or leave. In 2010, the women of an isolated religious community grapple with reconciling a brutal reality with their faith. “What follows is an act of female imagination,” is the opening title card to Sarah Polley’s talking debate drama Women Talking. The eight Mennonite woman gathered in…
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All Quiet on the Western Front: Getting Beyond 1917
Plot via IMDB A young German soldier’s terrifying experiences and distress on the western front during World War I. All Quiet on the Western Front, Germany’s official Oscar submission, echoes not only its Erich Maria Remarque source novel, but Sam Mendes, 1917, another World War I film. This is the first German language version of…
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Aftersun: Building to All Our Mournful Memories
Plot via IMDB Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories real and imagined fill the gaps between as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn’t. AfterSun, a subtle debut feature from Charlotte Wells, shows how…
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Sundance: The Tuba Thieves
Plot via Sundance:A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story…
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Sundance: Mami Wata
Plot via Sundance:In the oceanside village of Iyi, the revered Mama Efe (Rita Edochie) acts as an intermediary between the people and the all-powerful water deity Mami Wata. But when a young boy is lost to a virus, Efe’s devoted daughter Zinwe (Uzoamaka Aniunoh) and skeptical protégé Prisca (Evelyne Ily Juhen) warn Efe about unrest…
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Sundance: When It Melts
Plot via Sundance:Eva struggles with human connection. Now that her younger sister Tess is moving out, and long estranged from her neglectful parents, the fragile Eva is finally truly alone. Already reeling, she’s instinctively revulsed by a social media post announcing the memorial celebration for a long-passed childhood friend. She emotionally recalls her sensitive 13-year-old…
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Sundance: Girl
Plot via Sundance:Mother-daughter duo Grace and Ama have established a deep bond that’s protected them from outsiders, but as they start anew in Glasgow, things begin to change. Ama’s burgeoning puberty and curiosity set off reminders of a past that 24-year-old Grace has been running from. The comforting fairytale-like origin story that Grace has been…
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Sundance: Scrapper
Plot via Sundance:Following her mother’s death, a resourceful 12-year-old girl, Georgie (Lola Campbell), continues to live alone in their London-outskirts flat. She makes money stealing bikes with her friend, Ali (Alin Uzun), and keeps the social workers off her back by pretending to live with an uncle. It works like a charm until Jason (Harris…
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Sundance: La Pecera (The Fishbowl)
Plot via Sundance:After years of remission, Noelia’s cancer has returned and is spreading quickly. Exhausted by relentless treatment plans and pills that do more harm than good, she seeks another way out. Brushing aside her boyfriend Jorge’s well-meaning but suffocating gestures, she heads back to Vieques, the blissful eastern Puerto Rican island where she grew…
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Sundance: Mama Cruz
Plot via Sundance:Devoutly religious Cruz leads a routine existence with her husband and precocious granddaughter Viky, while her daughter Carlota chases her dream of becoming a professional dancer in Vienna. A single errant click while attempting to navigate the internet momentarily exposes Cruz to online pornography. She’s mortified but suddenly reminded of her own desires.…
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Sundance: Slow
Plot via Sundance:Contemporary dancer Elena meets Dovydas when he is assigned to interpret via sign language in a class she is teaching to deaf youth. Their connection is immediate, kinetic, and frictionless. As they gravitate toward each other, resisting the forces and interventions of their separate daily lives, their bond deepens from platonic to romantic.…
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Sundance: Bad Behaviour
Plot via Sundance:Lucy seeks enlightenment. The former child actress makes a pilgrimage to join her guru, Elon Bello (Ben Whishaw), for a silent retreat at a beautiful mountain resort with a Tesla-crammed parking lot. Before she shuts off her phone to the world, Lucy reaches out to her daughter, Dylan — a stunt person training…
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Sundance: Animalia
Plot via Sundance:Heavily pregnant Itto looks forward to a day of peace and quiet when she gets her affluent household mostly to herself after her husband, Amine, goes away on business. She’s quickly lost sight of her modest origins and has adapted to her new family’s detached opulence. But when a mysterious state of emergency…
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Sundance: Heroic
Plot via Sundance:Eighteen-year-old Luis (Santiago Sandoval Carbajal) enlists as an infantry cadet in the Heroic Military College in the hopes of becoming an officer and supporting his struggling family. Tucked away in the mountains and surrounded by statues honoring Aztec gods, the school is constructed from giant slabs of stone and ruled by even more…
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Sundance: All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Plot via SundanceTender caresses and enveloping embraces are portals into the life of Mack, a Black woman in Mississippi. Winding through the anticipation, love, and heartbreak she experiences from childhood to adulthood, the expressionist journey is an ode to connection — with loved ones and with place. Review notes: All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt…
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Sundance: A Thousand and One
Plot via SundanceStruggling but unapologetically living on her own terms, Inez is moving from shelter to shelter in mid-1990s New York City. With her 6-year-old son Terry in foster care and unable to leave him again, she kidnaps him so they can build their life together. As the years go by, their family grows and…
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Sundance: The Starling Girl
Plot via Sundance:Seventeen-year-old Jem Starling struggles to define her place within her fundamentalist Christian community in rural Kentucky. Even her greatest joy — the church dance group — is tempered by worry that her love of dance is actually sinful, and she’s caught between a burgeoning awareness of her own sexuality and an instinctive resistance…
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Sundance: Fair Play
Plot via SundanceHot off the heels of their new engagement, thriving New York couple Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) can’t get enough of each other. When a coveted promotion at a cutthroat financial firm arises, supportive exchanges between the lovers begin to sour into something more sinister. As the power dynamics irrevocably shift…
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Sundance: Fancy Dance
Plot via SundanceSince her sister’s disappearance, Jax (Lily Gladstone) has cared for her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) by scraping by on the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation in Oklahoma. Every spare minute goes into finding her missing sister while also helping Roki prepare for an upcoming powwow. At the risk of losing custody to Jax’s father, Frank (Shea…
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Sundance: Mutt
Plot via Sundance:Feña, a young trans guy bustling through life in New York City, is afflicted with an incessantly challenging day that resurrects ghosts from his past. Laundromats, subway turnstiles, and airport transfers are the hectic background to this emotional drama that overlaps past, present, and future. Settling the disharmony of transitional upheaval in relationships…
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Sundance: The Accidental Getaway Driver
Plot via Sundance:Long, a Vietnamese driver in Southern California, answers a late-night call for a ride. Already in his pajamas, he reluctantly accepts, picking up a man, Tây, and his two companions. But the men, recently escaped convicts from an Orange County jail, take Long hostage at gunpoint, thrusting him into their getaway plan. When…
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Sundance: Magazine Dreams
Plot via SundanceKillian Maddox lives with his ailing veteran grandfather, obsessively working out between court-mandated therapy appointments and part-time shifts at a grocery store where he harbors a crush on a friendly cashier. Though Killian’s struggles to read social cues and maintain control of his volatile temper amplify his sense of disconnection amid a hostile…
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Sundance: Shortcomings
Plot via Sundance:Ben, a struggling filmmaker, lives in Berkeley, California, with his girlfriend, Miko, who works for a local Asian American film festival. When he’s not managing an art house movie theater as his day job, Ben spends his time obsessing over unavailable blond women, watching Criterion Collection DVDs, and eating in diners with his…
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Sundance: Theater Camp
Plot via Sundance:As summer rolls around again, kids are gathering from all over to attend AdirondACTS, a scrappy theater camp in upstate New York that’s a haven for budding performers. After its indomitable founder Joan (Amy Sedaris) falls into a coma, her clueless “crypto-bro” son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) is tasked with keeping the thespian paradise…
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Sundance: Short Film Program 1; Six Shorts
Help Me Understand Plot: Six women must come to a consensus on a detergent brand scent. Review notes: There are heavy shadings of 12 Angry Men in the dozen brand testing panel women futilely trying to turn the mind of the lone hold out. As the stakes gets higher, the frustrations more real, the claws…
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A Man Called Otto: Tom Hanks Gets a Little G(r)umpy
Plot (Sony Pctures):Based on the # 1 New York Times bestseller “A Man Called Ove,” A Man Called Otto tells the story of Otto Anderson (Tom Hanks), a grump who no longer sees purpose in his life following the loss of his wife. Otto is ready to end it all, but his plans are interrupted…
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Missing: Google How to Overwrite a Thriller
Plot (from Wikipedia)When her mother disappears while on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend, June’s search for answers is hindered by international red tape. Stuck thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, June creatively uses all the latest technology at her fingertips to try and find her before it’s too late. However, as she…
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The Art of Graffiti Removal
I always believed until long after my mother died that she was the onlyperson who loved meand thatmy father was a shriveled man at heart.Once my mother fell hard on the floorand he never bothered to lift her up orgive her a helping hand. Then my mother died andhe tried to replace her,becoming more generous,more…
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Son of Monarchs
The monarch flutters above the ash and in its black and orange beautyexists all day and night. It flies up to meet the sun,the gentle maternal hand of life lived in the light.Only the scent of milkweedlures it down to ground for the paternity of feasting and breeding.In its flight between earth and sky, I…
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America: The Motion Picture- Doesn’t Let Alternate Facts Get in the Way of Its Own Inane History Lesson.
When filmmakers fall asleep and flunk high school American History, America: The Motion Picture is what’s created years later- an animated, anarchic, free association lunacy that mixes up the American Revolution with the Civil War and shows that it respects America by disregarding its truth and hyping its memes. In this alternate America, George-Bon Jovi-Washington…
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The Projection Room
If lucky I will die in a room of non-hospital green, on plump pillows, good linens, with good family and good friends,the ghosts of loves, the odoramaof nitrate seas, forests or mountains on walls.Room where well-cast dreams lived and died. Will my death be the end of a long love,mystery, tragedy or comedy,flashback to life…
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The Dig
Blow the dust of history off our bones. In the excavated ribs of ancient sailing shipsfind the burial chambers of kings. Blow the dust of history off our bones.In the dig just below them, but just over the rubble of the blitz are the cracks in the golden cathedral’s dome.Blow the dust of history off…
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Where Waldo Is Not
The greatest where’s Waldo paintings to be have him the tiniest spot at the very top in a population of near clones. After searching everywhere he will be the last thing you’ll find, the last thing you’ll see. Your life will have meaning again after generations of searching and playing the game. …
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A Gun and a Hotel Bible
No bad guy talks alone to a Bible in a hotel room with a gun in his hand. “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death…” the good book says or he thinks in a cold sweat. …
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Wolfwalkers
The town exists in harsh geometry, the forest— a fiery flow. The wolf leaps above their soul, a crescent moon. Run the wolf. Flee the wolf. Don’t go beyond the wall lest you be devoured. When the wolf howls they make work their prayer, their protection. They pray a whole…
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Small Axe: Lovers Rock
The music is the scent in the air that changes everything. “I’ve got no time to lie, I’ve got no time to play your silly games,” it croons with a sweet she reggae lilt pairing off the lovers from the pretenders, shedding bodies to kiss and writhe in adjacent rooms or the nearest alley until…
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Identifying Features
My mother wanted me to go away. I hardly sent her anything. From behind, we all look alike.
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Small Axe: Mangrove
All you wicked men what is wrong with you? There is no black Justice seen on the Sistine Chapel. Only the stupidities that can make a stuff bird laugh- the small axe ready to cut the big tree down. Based loosely on theSteve McQueen anthology of films. The first in the series is…
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The Art of Dying
The Pandemic has closed the theaters and cinemas. On stage a lone actor commits suicide in the loneliness. On screen the two lovers run to each other against the march of soldiers. The actor’s death is an extravagant fake, a nod to the art of dying a good stage death. The…
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Seeing Jaws Again
Her name you may or may not recall. It was Chrissie, the body in the sand dune. You do remember the shark, the blood on the water, death spreading like a virus in the town of Amity. You do remember that the beaches should have been closed but Amity was a summer town…
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Max von Sydow Made Me Believe
When he cried on the cross he made me believe in Jesus. When he blessed a devil child he made me believe in His Word. When he mated death he made me believe in the light. When he ate a wild strawberry he made me know love. When he held his…
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Onward- to the Rediscovered Realm
In a realm of two moons and three suns not afraid to be besieged by everlasting brightness, where everyone speaks from their heart spires and devils and scorpions cavort with sprites, magic coexisted with every day miracles. People would cross on invisible bridges as easily as Jesus walking on water, on their way to their…
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The Call of the Wild
What does a dog know of being a wolf, a wolf know of being a dog? The wolf howls not to understand the moon but to know itself in the community of nature, to shout out its place in the pack and among the stars. It knows hunger that a dog will…
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Gretel and Hansel Get Parental Advice
We tell our children not to wander in the woods, never to stop or enter the cottage with the peppermint scent and gingerbread façade for a naked witch is sleeping inside. Beware the milk weeping from an axe handle outside, the tingling inside that stretches from heart to toes that neither sinks nor swims…
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Underwater
I am Jonah in the belly of Leviathan living only when the beast surfaces, exchanging liquid grief, heavy air for the unwanted gasps of new life. I pray out of this belly for gills and only the ocean hears my voice, It deepens and encompasses me, its waves billowing me in absolution. The…
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The Song of Names
It was chanted for five Sabbaths in a row in the small synagogue with the charred bimah, ashes staining the tzitzits of the rebbe’s tallit, as he raised his arms above his head, closed his eyes and sang the first alaf of seven thousand dabars, the oral memory passed down six generations, a psalm for…
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Just Mercy
Southern justice is the snake that slithers up the tree before the buzz of the lumberjack’s saw, the duck of the head to fit it into the squad car, the dark voice singing in a dark cell put on death row before his trial, convicted for the color of his skin before he was even…
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The Hand
Every cut is a bleeding thorn, every breath is a spread of fingers. The ear records all its silences. – Lose a hand and it goes to the trash heap, lose an ear and everyone will think of Van Gogh. – In the landfill the hand discovers fire, it discovers how to conquer the rats,…
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The Two Popes
For some God comes in silence and for others it’s a saxophone solo. He’s the confession a lonely parish priest has waited all day to see and hear after lattice hours of watching smoke blow down like Cain’s rejected offering. Every soul has two Popes, both living in God but are not of it.…
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Yoda Siths the Universe for the Rise of Skywalker
The force is another Jedi mind trick that convinces the soul that all that is Sith is not necessarily sin but the whining of a baby Yoda aware of his Death Star.
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Honey Boy
We carry our fathers on our backs, honey boys to their joys and violence, absorbing their frustrations in memory or dispersing their cries into indifferent winds. Our hearts listen for the end of the cycle powerless to the mind beating the rhythm anew and the soul’s prayers for forgiveness bounded in an eternal history…
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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Mr. Rogers grace exists in miniature cities of kindness, – the tranquil tones of forgiveness, level to the eye of a single frighten child. – For him, and in that moment, that child is the most precious thing in the world. – He blesses them with positive ways of dealing with their feelings; – the…
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Knives Out
Let the black dogs run wild, sharpen the knives for some real back stabbing, roundup the usual suspects, the mystery is about to begin. – The cardigan teen with his nose buried in his iPhone- he’s a suspect- murderous thoughts sprouting his blood-brain barrier. – The neglected son tethered to a high ranking, paying position…
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Cop Movie or 21 Bridges
Those who tread the thin blue line knows it follows through their lineage. – Strong boys become men, then become cops. The rest become robbers, the devil that stares them in the eye for the rest of their life. – If they are good they’ll get their shoot out in the slaughterhouse.
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The Good Liar
It’s hard to tell the lies of impression, the little bits of puffery that makes one look good in the eyes of a would be admirer. – One may say their name with a French flair. Betty becomes Bette. Roy becomes Roy-al, with the long affected A stretched out to tomorrow. – One may even…
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I See Celluloid Angels and Not One of Them Is Charlie’s
Every Angel Second Class jumps into the river of George Bailey’s despair, and after being rescued shows everything that never should have existed, everything that was, everything that could be contained in the Odbody of his inner existence, the baptism, the worth and joy of all his toil. – -No man gets into heaven by…
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Your First Mustang or Ford vs Ferrari (A Movie Poem)
Everything is a continuous white line that goes on forever to the horizon where the next dream is always ahead. – Just you and the mustang a body and a machine moving through space and time. – Drive like you mean it. Drive hard. Drive tight. – The Mustang is a wild bronco not wanting…
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Making It- Midway (A Movie Poem)
Stella remembers when the Zeros flew thru her backyard and she saw Pearl Harbor in flames, blue bodies bouncing on the waves. – Afterward, welders melted the steel of capsized destroyers hoping to rescue any upside down survivors. – Her Billy drafted six months before would fly Wildcats in the Marshall Islands and in the…
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The Shining 2 or Doctor Sleep (A Movie Poem)
The earlier horror leaves DT a broken drunken man building smaller worlds within worlds, boxes within boxes, memories within smaller memories to keep the monsters from eating the shining he has left. – He is forever moving to the same room with different people. – “We are all dying”, he thinks, “The world is one…
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Film Noir or Motherless Brooklyn (A Movie Poem)
In the rear view mirror he can see the specters.. – her upside down reflection scatter when a foot hits the puddle… – hear the notes of a trumpet solo popping thru the open red door of a jazz club… – remembers when they whacked his partner… – and left their footprints on his ribs..…
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Harriet (A Movie Poem)
1. The biggest tree exists to neither swing nor sway, doesn’t wait for a strong wind to emancipate it from roots, to be turned into freedom papers to be torn up by the master. – The swing was created by the master, to exist until the limb snaps and the sway of blood to earth…
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The Singularity or Terminator: Dark Fate (A Movie Poem)
The machine that replaces you and the one that ascends you will fight it out on the factory floor. – Ultimately, it’s another machine, the gun, that will save you from a lethal precision that can cut flies in midair. – Put a hundred cops between you and the singularity and you get one hundred…
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Okay
“Are you okay?”, my wife asks when I cough. – “No. I’m fine. Yes. I’m not”, I respond, – stumping her in the poetic irony of words that – encompass the yes and no and the in between. – She flips the finger at me and I return the bird to the nest. – We…
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The Lighthouse (A Movie Poem)
Doldrums, doldrums eviler than the devil. – The Cyclopes’ prism eye revolves around me in a mechanical chatter. – It calls out desires at night, a mermaid cast up on shore – that awakens with the caw of a thousand slaughtered gulls – sending me scrambling back to the darkness, – afraid to touch the…
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Pain and Glory (A Movie Poem)
“If you do not write or film”, the director wonders, ”am I alive?” – “What limbo am I in when the shooting stops? When my camera no longer holds the beautiful prism.” – His films stay the same, only he changes, exchanging the silver screen for glistening tin foil heated under with a match. –…
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Parasite (A Movie Poem)
Parasites: they insinuate themselves into your head, your heart, your art. – They exist in the schizophrenic zone: the lower right corner of your painting looking for patterns that go to childhood, the well rehearsed gestures that allow them to take over, plant the image in your agitated brain that makes you doubt your love,…
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Dreaming Graceland or Zombieland: Double Tap (A Movie Poem)
When you think Elvis was a fraud, a rip off the black man’s voice; – when you finally meet someone who smells like candles instead of gunpowder and whiskey; – who is comfortable with you driving that pink Cadillac all the way to Memphis; – who won’t throw your pink stuff to the side of…
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Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (A Movie Poem)
The absence of love makes one a villain in other’s hearts. – In the proposal the weeping willow sheds its leaves to the sky, – while in the bowels below the servants of the earth forge war, – pull iron from earth as it screams to be reclaimed. – Above, silk napkins unfold into laps…
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Gemini Man (A poem loosely inspired by the movie)
It’s the mirror you don’t look into, the one without the morals, emotions, doubts and fears. – How much wisdom do you gain in confronting your older self, tailing it thru a city of statues and bridges, fighting with it in the catacombs amidst an audience of smiling skulls? – You have trained to be…
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Judy (A Movie Poem)
She always knew that Oz was a one-time voyage lasting until the red shoes dancing on and on cracks the golden road, wears it to dirt dreams, her tired legs collapsing into poppy fields, pills, her voice singing on and on in the fall until hoarse, silent and invisible. – She sings because she’s a…
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Ad Astra: To the Stars (A Movie Poem)
Each launch begins with a prayer until I have a puncture, a rip, a tear. Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! I am always falling either to the earth or to the stars, falling forward to God the Father or father to son. To survive I move in the vacuum between calm heartbeat and silent in-breath, …
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Dog Acts
I like America’s Got Talent, especially when they have dog acts. I love dog acts. I cry at dog acts. I wish dog acts would bark and chase those young kids and aspiring adults who sing opera every year and get into the semifinals off the stage; chase the pretentious dance troupes and acrobats;…
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Rain Dance
The rain creates its own ballet starting with a lone figure on a bridge holding an umbrella in the fog splashing teardrops with his feet, doing jetes over the larger puddles, until the wind inverts his shade, plies turning to pirouettes, approaches cascading to the portal and the head of the street, dancing to a…
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The Hummingbird Bird Project: One Millisecond Better than Most Everything Else
The Hummingbird Project is about the impossibility of stealing time, one millisecond to be exact. That’s how much faster their fiber optic cable spanning from Kansas City to the New York Stock Exchange will be than the competition. Pennies in commission times thousands of transactions equals hundred of millions in a slow year. So you…
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Stan & Ollie: Finds the Sad Truth After the Visual Gag Has Shined
The best time and light for film biographies is twilight. Everything old looks grand in the dying light and creeping shadows, and it hardly matters that the actorly imitation is a step or two behind the genuine article. At that age everything is reflection, memory, regret and sadness, hopes of resurrecting those youthful steps and…
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Gloria Bell: Julianne Moore Gets Stuck in Her Own Msempowerment Story
There is a sadness to all the disco bumping and grinding in Gloria Bell, a remake of the director’s Sebastian Lelio’s 2013 Spanish original Gloria. These are middle age divorced quasi boomers looking for love, but unsure how to negotiate the first awkward steps that lead to the bedroom. There life is a series of…
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Shazam: The DCU Discovers Its Kid Side
Fans have been waiting for the DC Cinematic Universe to lighten up and are applauding Shazam as a step in the right direction. Shazam is just Big in superhero tights. Only in the dour DC Universe does Shazam seem a joyful cry. Shazam isn’t a revolution just a smart marketing ploy designed to appease those…
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The Mustang: A Rehabilitative Western
The western at its heart has always been a love story between a man and his horse. The new modern western focus on the rehabilitation of the soul between both man and beast. The Mustang hones in on the very essence of that plot fact, concentrating on those most in need of rehabilitation, prisoner and…
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“Dumbo”: Tim Burton Soars With an Earthbound Story
In Tim Burton’s version of Dumbo, the only thing that keeps the whole thing from really soaring is the gravity of the plot. Sure, Dumbo the baby elephant needs to overcome earthly woes in order to reach heavenly heights, but it doesn’t need to be so plainly pedestrian in order to get there. Dumbo revolves…
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The Aftermath: WWII Triangle Caught Between Two Good
The new historical WWII romance The Aftermath seems to be factoring the losing German side feeling into the equation. Kiera Knightley falls in love with Alexander Skarsgard the aristocratic German capitalist whose family mansion has been seized for the personal use of a British commander (Jason Clarke) sent in to rebuild the British sector of…
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“Us”: Getting Past Us and the Shtick of Them
Us is them, you, me, U.S., United States and all the good black and white and in between moments. It being horror, Us. is also Halloween, The Birds, The Shining, Jaws, eventually Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th, Black Swan. You get the point- the references, the pastiche, the absurd visual metaphors involving…