INTRODUCTION: What’s Your Favorite Movie?
In 2019, we asked composer Orlando Garcia to name his favorite movie. We said to Orlando, “Obviously, it’s impossible to name one favorite movie, but if you are channel-surfing and you see a listing for a film that you have seen many times before, which film would you dive into no matter which part of the movie, because you know most of the dialogue and remember all of the plot. Or to put it another way, if you were on a desert island and could only watch one movie for the rest of your life, which movie would it be?”
We have continued to ask this “favorite movie” question during our video conversations ever since, because the answers are always interesting. Click on “Read More” to see the movies that our ArtSpeak interviewees selected.
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INTRODUCTION: “Annie B’s Sleeper Movies”
ANNE BERNAYS is an author, journalist, and educator. She is also a movie aficionado and will be reviewing “Sleeper Movies” for ArtSpeak – movies that have gone unnoticed for one reason or another, but which have struck her as worth writing about. Look for new reviews every fortnight (or so).
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Movie Review: “Tender Mercies”
Those of you who have read what I write for ArtSpeak, know that I’m a less-is-more kind of girl. Infected by Ernest Hemingway, my own prose tends to be boiled down to its basics. Henry James—with the exception of some of his short stories, drives me nuts, as do Cormac Macarthy and Annie Proulx. The movie “Tender Mercies” is spare, lean, and has the same sort of impact that a Shakespeare sonnet and a Bach Invention do—an emotional impact within a small canvas.
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Movie Review: “Burn After Reading”
The Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, have been making movies since 1984 — no two anything like any of the others. If you liked “The Money Pit” or “Arrested Development” or “Afterlife” — all of them satire/farces, you’ll love “Burn After Reading.”
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Movie Review: “The Paper” — Michael Who?
“The Paper,” a 1994 product directed by Ron Howard, is about styles of journalism and its responsibilities. Keaton plays Henry Hackett, an editor at The Sun, a New York City daily tabloid. Think Daily News or Daily Mirror, famous for their dazzling headlines and tantalizing leads. Having taught journalists to write fiction for thirty years, I’ve come to realize that journalism is not just a job you go to every weekday, but is a calling, with deeper imperatives than money or status. Young reporters are routinely underpaid and overworked which suggests that “truth” matters to them ahead of any other consideration — money, status, glamorous partners, gold watches or vacations in Tahiti.
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Movie Review: “The Holdovers” — Emotional Treacle
From the moment I saw a promotional photo of the three starred actors of “The Holdovers” I knew what was going to unfold in this startlingly over-praised, predictable movie.
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