Shaun Brady’s NY Times story “She’s Blazing a Trail for a Traditional Korean Zither in Jazz” (archived), about “Seoul-born gayageum player DoYeon Kim,” of course interested me as a jazz fan, but I was also (more Hattically) intrigued by the word gayageum. Wikipedia says: The gayageum or kayagum (Korean: 가야금; Hanja: 伽倻琴) is a traditional Korean musical instrument. It is a plucked zither with 12 strings, though some more recent variants have 18, 21 or 25 strings. It is probably the best known…
The Juggler (1953)
Before Ina, there was Meryl. It’s no secret that this project was inspired by Julie & Julia – I mean, this was the first post to @storeboughtisfine: Prior to attempting every Barefoot Contessa recipe, I spent all of 2012 tackling Meryl Streep’s entire filmography. About 9 years ago, my friend Tony and I started our annual Merylthon – a way to celebrate our shared love of Meryl. While we originally had some Meryl-themed snacks in the past (She-Deviled Eggs was a personal favorite) we now do full…
...is taking the weekend off.This weekend I'm attending the annual TCM Classic Film Festival!The column will also not appear next weekend, when I'll be at the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival.I'll have reporting on both festivals here as soon as possible, given my time away.Around the Blogosphere This Week will return on Saturday, May 16th.In the meantime, please visit my most recent April 25th roundup column here.
Photo by Tommy Lau.Classic movie aficionados lucky enough to both be within a close distance of San Francisco and have some dough-re-me on hand to spend will get quite the treat when the San Francisco Silent Film Festival hits the Castro Theatre from May 6-10.Returning to the big screen from 100+ years ago ready to rock the house - silent movies at their operatic best, accompanied quite literally by a symphony orchestra. San Francisco's 29th Silent Film Festival will return to the hallowed…
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Movies 36 Hours to Kill (1936) D: Eugene Forde. S: Brian Donlevy, Gloria Stuart, Douglas Fowley, Paul Fix, Jonathan Hale. Relaxed cheapie thriller about gangster Fowley taking a cross-country train to escape a dragnet, only to run into somewhat nosy reporter Donlevy. They then get into a love triangle with mystery woman Stuart. It’d be a lot better if at least ten minutes (of a sixty-five-minute runtime) weren’t dedicated to crappy racist jokes at Fetchit’s expense. A Blueprint for Murder…
FAIR WINDS AND FOLLOWING SEAS: Alex Zanard, ex-F1 driver and Paralympic champion dies aged 59. The 15-time CART race winner and two-time series champion, having had both legs amputated in a 2001 crash, transitioned to a second career as a handcycle racer, winning four gold medals for Italy in the 2012 London and 2016 Rio Paralympic Games, along with 12 other world championships in the sport. He passed yesterday, six years after a collision with a truck while handcycling in in a 2020 June road…
I almost forgot that it's already been two months since the last one of these! Movies Predator: Badlands (2025) Watched on 2026-03-05: ★★★★★ Predator: Badlands (2025) I enjoyed this one. I really liked Thia's chipper can-do attitude, despite not having legs for most of the movie, and Dek's naive, grunty dedication to the hunt and later to his new companions. Predator vs late stage interstellar capitalism etc Review on Letterboxd Roofman (2025) Watched on 2026-03-07: ★★★★ Roofman (2025) Pretty…
First, we have to start with Alice Guy’s THE CONSEQUENCES OF FEMINISM. I know, we’ve probably all seen it. But it remains fascinating. Alice Guy, pioneering female director, makes a comedy about how reversing gender roles will make a nightmarish upside-down society. While the film reads on the surface as an attack on feminism, it […]
L-R: Samantha Begeman, Clare Stenning and Jad Sayegh in Brief Play About Rage, Omnibus Theatre Brief Play About Rage at the Omnibus Theatre is a funny one. You’ll either get it or you won’t. You’ll either find it hilarious and daring or OTT and irritating. It’s set in the flat of Val (Samantha Begeman) and Hugh (Jad Sayegh), and tensions are running high as they await the arrival of Val’s old ‘friend’ Nell (Clare Stenning). They only have two chairs, but neither seems concerned about where…
As far as I’m concerned, the story of Jessica Jones ended with Season 3 of the Netflix show. To hell with this whole Daredevil Born Again bit, and all the spinoffs that dribble from the corner of its nerveless mouth. I was willing to give the parent thing a chance - I knew they'd mindlessly echo that unfortunate mess from the comics eventually - but they couldn’t just stop there. They had to add this bullshit with her powers glitching and make her live in the burbs. Disney is really, really…
“Na’vi kids younger than me do this [taming moidaboids] with their bare hands.”“Jake Sully did it the hard way?”“What do you think?” Okay now this is interesting, the symbolic significance that Jake has taken on in Quariitch’s mind, both as the last link to his former self and as the standard to which he must hold himself, ritualistically recreating Jake’s journey into Na’vihood but for the opposite reasons, trying to make of himself a dark messiah. ⦁ ⦁ ⦁ ⦁ ⦁ It’s good to know that…
Go deep into the production weeds of Million Dollar Secret in my interview with its showrunner, Charles Wachter. We talked clues, scripting, b-roll, The Stag's staff, and so much more.
The other night, I was browsing Mike Flanagan's tumblr when I read this amazing article about how Doctor Sleep came to be and how it put him on the path of sobriety. I adored this post, not only because I'm a fan of Mike's, but also because of how real it was. The pictures he posted weren't flattering or edited. It didn't feel over produced or edited by a publicist. Instead, it was just a regular guy, telling an amazing story of how he was able to do something incredible, even though it didn't…
I guess this shows just how old I am because I loved every single one of the “Oscar-bait” movies in this list (I do agree on TCM though)... When I was a kid, I would watch Turner Classic Movies and try to appreciate films from the 1940s, only to find the exercise strangely difficult. I could admire them—in theory—but I struggled to experience these stories the way their original audiences did. I feel similarly about many Oscar-bait dramas of the 1990s, including but not limited to: Chocolat,…
Mariclare Costello, best known for playing teacher Rosemary Hunter on the hit TV series The Waltons, died on April 17, 2026 at the age of 90.Mariclare Costello was born on February 3, 1936, in Peoria, Illinois. Her father, Dallas, worked as a civil engineer for the Illinois Department of Transportation and her mother, Margaret, was a secretary to the Illinois Speaker of the House. Mariclare Costello went to St. Mark School and the Academy of Our Lady in Peoria. She then attended Clarke College…
ROOTING FOR HER: Dystany Spurlock set for NASCAR Truck Series debut at Watkins Glen. Spurlock would become the first Black female driver to appear in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.
I read yesterday about a new Kickstarter project: I’m Back Roll APS-C – Digital Film Inside Your Camera by Samuel Mello Medeiros The terrible name aside ("I'm Back"??), the project sounds interesting. In short, it's a roll of digital "film" that you insert into your 35mm film camera, transforming it into a digital camera. So now, instead of taking your photos on film and waiting to have them developed, you can get your photos from your digital "roll" right away. The feature for this is the…
Kind of scrounging because I haven't seen the predecessor to the big sequel that's squeezing everything I couldn't get to during IFFBoston into a few scattered showtimes, how 'bout you? That sequel is The Devil Wears Prada 2, reuniting Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci from the 2006 original, with Hathaway's character now a seasoned veteran outside of fashion brought in
I got a review copy of DANGER: DIABOLIK (or just plain DIABOLIK) from the lovely people at Masters of Cinema, so I’d better review it, hadn’t I? The film may not need reviewing — I had my DVD playing one time when a friend visited, and just from glimpsing random scenes with the sound turned […]
How many bees does it take to rear a queen?Using nano-colonies, scientists have shown that as few as 100 bees can rear a new queen (Lamas et al., 2025). That's right, 100 nurse bees in a perforated plastic cup in an incubator, provided with a 12-hour-old queen cell (i.e., one that's just been started), will rear the queen to emergence. There's no difference between the mating success of queens reared like this and those reared in a traditional cell builder {{1}}.However, if you read about…
FlicFilm Aurora 800 / Nikon Coolscan / SmartConvert / Zeiss 21mm EF Said man. Said Arriflex 16BL.
A classic string investigation board appears in Elsbeth s02e14 (CBS, 2025). ▲ Elsbeth s02e14 (CBS, 2025) ▲ Elsbeth s02e14 (CBS, 2025) ▲ Elsbeth s02e14 (CBS, 2025) ▲ Elsbeth s02e14 (CBS, 2025) ▲ Elsbeth s02e14 (CBS, 2025) From contributor Justin Wigard.
A prop master’s work isn’t always flashy. Often, they are tasked with making pragmatic choices to flesh out a scene with items that the audience won’t even notice. These are some of the stories I’ve most enjoyed as I’ve gotten to know Twin Peaks prop master Jeff Moore, whose work in the second season both... The post Twin Peaks Prop – Mr. Tojamura’s Great Northern Key Tag appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.
The Fritzes award honors the best interfaces in a full-length motion picture in the past year. Interfaces play a special role in our movie-going experience, and are a craft all their own that does not otherwise receive focused recognition. Best Assistant is a special award that I’m giving for the first time. Ok but why now? Well, in March of this year I published a new non-fiction book about the design of technology that assists people doing things (as opposed to doing stuff for them). It’s…
Image source: Wikipedia Long thought lost like so much of the silent era, a copy of the 1924 thriller-melodrama The Signal Tower was eventually discovered in 16mm. Directed by Clarence Brown before he became famous for his handling of several women’s melodramas in the 1930s, The Signal Tower is a simple, brisk, and effective piece of work. You can watch it in rather muddy quality on YouTube, but since it’s made the rounds at a few film festivals, I’m hoping it will be available in a nicer home…
How come so few people know about this film? That is the question I always end up asking myself after every viewing. Holiday is a delightful, witty, touching and inspiring Screwball gem, featuring a perfect balance of comedy and poignant drama. The comedy here lies not in the form of slapstick or constant Marx Brothers-esque verbal zingers, but instead in the verbal and physical reactions of certain people to certain situations and things said or done by others. The film’s focus is on the…
Glenn Ford in Human Desire (1954) Vitals Glenn Ford as Jeff Warren, railroad engineer and Army veteran El Reno, Oklahoma, Fall 1953 Film: Human Desire Release Date: August 6, 1954 Director: Fritz Lang Costume Designer: Jean Louis (gowns) WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background Glenn Ford was born 110 years ago on May 1, 1916. The Quebec-born actor specialized as everymen with a tough side, making him the ideal star in classic film noir like Gilda (1946) and The Big Heat (1953) as well as westerns…
