An Eclectic Journal of the Arts
Written in the Mirror Watch the over-the-top Douglas Sirk melodramas of the 1950s for the color, costume, design, emotion — for sheer guilty pleasure. If you catch yourself over-indulging, pull back from the spectacle to wonder how he does it, what technical magic or tricks are at work. Or lean in from another angle to […]
“The Quiet Girl,” based on Claire Keegan’s beautiful novel, Foster, which I reviewed here, is the first film in the Irish language to be nominated for an Oscar, and it’s easy to see why. It retains most of the story from the original source, and draws tremendous depth and emotion from the unsaid and misunderstood. […]
Swimming in rough seas is the perfect metaphor for myths and legends, for the telling of ancient tales from long ago and far away. Those tales form bridges to the present that can open minds to a host of reflections, including doubts about our current ways of seeing the world — especially, perhaps, our sense […]
Compassion and empathy toward others, freely given and returned in kind. This is natural to humans, but so is a lust by the ruling class to control these higher impulses, lest they take precedence over fear-based obedience to the diktats of that same ruling class. A society of compassion and empathy toward others would go […]
More paintings, more departures. Utilizing a digital knife for blending, and a steel wool effect in some cases. Imagining all of this on massive canvasses, propped up on giant easels, in one of a dozen rooms in my ancient castle by the sea. Thick walls, high ceilings, stone floors — sun and moon seeping in […]
Spinozablue welcomes new poetry by John Grey, Nanette Avery, and D.R. James. Rereading some good books about Camus and his times, which strike me as highly relevant again. Robert Zaretsky’s Elements of a Life, and Alice Kaplan’s Looking for the Stranger, with more on my To Be Read shelf, including The Plague. His refusal to follow […]
Just watched “Dark City” again, one of my favorite movies, ever. It’s been a while since my last viewing. More than a decade, in fact. Unfortunately, the version I watched wasn’t the remastered DVD version I had seen back in 2009, which had provoked this review in Spinozablue many moons ago. It was still excellent, […]
The Tempest before the storm. Rocky shores, an island, a remote, semi-protected place for women alone. But they aren’t. And they know it. They know what awaits them offshore. They know what surrounds them, has always surrounded them. They know the countless obstacles in their way. Not just being young women. But being young […]
Directed by Geoffrey Orthwein and Andrew Sullivan, Bokeh is a beautifully understated Sci-Fi movie about the last two humans and what life might mean in that end of days context. Jenai (Maika Monroe) and Riley (Matt O’Leary), a young couple from America, take a romantic trip of a lifetime to Iceland, and only the first […]
Genius is the kind of film literary buffs may like a lot more than we should. One reason for this, I’m guessing, is the rarity of the subject matter for a Hollywood production: literary lives. Specifically, the dynamic between editor and novelist. Maxwell Perkins and Thomas Wolfe are the central characters, with cameos from Fitgerald […]