Last night I wanted to take my 82-year-old friend Martha to the movies, but she didn’t want to see Capitalism: A Love Story, so I proposed Amelia, which she readily agreed to. I guess I was also in the mood for a chick flick, maybe because in my class yesterday I gave myself a big [...]
Archives for October 2009
Life Imitates Art, Badly
There I was Friday morning getting ready to leave for my Intro to Story Structure class in which I planned to screen the 1956 children’s classic The Red Balloon, about a six-year-old boy who makes friends with a big red balloon and, ultimately, is carried off by a massive cluster of big multi-colored balloons, when [...]
Dated Dating Films
Last night I lectured on Annie Hall in my Script Analysis class. That was fun. This film is by far my favorite laugh-a-minute comedy about a failed relationship. In fact, it’s a perfect anti-dote when you’re afraid you may have come down with a touch of the festivalitis. I have lectured on this film many, [...]
A Year Ago in Winter
Perhaps the reason that festivalitis is so much on my mind is that the Mill Valley Film Festival is going on now down the street from me. The other night I saw “A Year Ago in Winter” by Caroline Link, which I picked out because of having loved so much her earlier film “Nowhere in [...]
A Touch of Festivalitis
This morning I learned from A.O. Scott of The New York Times, that I am a “festivalist.” Perhaps the more apt designation would be to say that I suffer from “festivalitis.” Actually, neither of these are strictly Scott’s terms. He coined the word “festivalism” to identify the over-wrought tendency among film festivals to program dark, [...]
More To Come On Roman Polanski
After posting my first blog entry over a week ago, I began work on a longer essay, giving a more developed perspective on this event. I am currently in the process of getting this piece placed in a major publication. My blog is so new, I doubt I have many readers at this point. And [...]