As long time readers know, I’m a huge movie buff. I usually watch three or four a week, either on TV, streamed or at our local indie theater; whenever I even contemplate moving away, the thought of losing ready access to it stops me.
I don’t watch horror or animation or kids’ movies or things based on cartoons, even though they are wildly popular.
Here are some of my favorites, and why:
Almost Famous (2002)
I’m hardly alone in my devotion to this one, widely considered an absolute treasure. It’s the true story of Cameron Crowe, who started writing music journalism as a teenager. In the film, William Miller, all of 15, goes AWOL from high school for weeks at a time, following a band called Stillwater across the U.S., by bus then by private plane, on assignment (!) for Rolling Stone. There are drugs and groupies and an electrical accident on stage. It’s the most fun any teen might have growing up quickly. The characters are based on real people and Peter Frampton is in the credits. The music is fantastic, with the bus scene of everyone singing Elton John’s Tiny Dancer an absolute classic. I’ve watched it many times and never tire of it.
Billy Elliot(2000)
As someone who studied ballet for many years, the ballet alone is a lure, but this sweet story of a working class kid hoping to flee his likely life working in a Northern England coal pit hits hard. Music, again, is key to this great movie, as is Billy, trying to become himself in a world that mocks anything so fluffy and unfamiliar. He desperately misses his late mom and his father and brother go on strike at great personal and financial cost. It’s as much a portrait of Thatcher’s Britain as a small boy and his dreams.
The Devil Wears Prada(2006)
Funny thing — another great soundtrack! KT Tunstall, Madonna and many more. Also based on a true story, the insider details of a former assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour — oh she of the helmet hair and dark glasses and fixed gaze. Andrea Sachs, whose only hope of a first journalism job is at Runway, a fashion magazine, must adapt, and fast, to a wholly new environment and super-demanding boss. Her boyfriend doesn’t get it, nor do her friends. Knowing the cut-throat world of NYC journalism, I do! The fashions are fab and Stanley Tucci is a great mentor to her as Nigel, the art director.
Good Will Hunting (1997)
Come for a very young, whip smart Matt Damon as Will, a former foster child, and Minnie Driver as Skylar, a Harvard student who falls in love with him and, of course, the great Robin Williams as the empathetic but tough shrink who finally gets Will to drop his defensive shell. Set in Boston, many of the scenes were actually filmed (this happens a lot!) in my hometown, Toronto, and on the campus of my alma mater, the University of Toronto filling in as MIT where Will works as a janitor. Funny and poignant, it’s well worth a look.
All four of these films feature hungry, ambitious youngsters doing what they can to get ahead while having some life-changing adventures — Andy’s trip to Paris for Fashion Week or Billy’s audition for ballet school.
All The President’s Men(1976)
Required viewing for every journalist, the true story of Woodward and Bernstein, two Washington Post reporters whose endless digging into the Watergate break-in led to Nixon’s resignation. Their days and nights of fruitless door-knocking and pursuit of terrified sources still rings true today — this is how investigative journalism happens, slowly and patiently and relentlessly. Their dubious boss, his Guccis perched on his desk, is also accurate. If anyone thinks journalism at this level is done quickly, easily and without fear —- watch it a few times.
Spotlight (2015)
Winner of the 2016 Oscar for Best Picture, another true story of how the Boston Globe’s investigative team dug and dug and dug — similar to ATPM — and unearthed horrifying sexual abuse perpetrated by the Catholic church. A friend, Jason Berry, wrote the first book about it, and I love seeing his name mentioned and shown in the credits. One aspect of the film I really appreciate, as a journalist, is how some stories hit you very hard personally, in this case calling one’s faith in the church into question.
Few films ever really show the drudgery of serious sustained reporting — it’s not wildly interesting to watch! But it’s really important, in an era of massive media distrust, to see what it actually takes.
Dr. Zhivago(1965)
David Lean made some of the most memorable films ever — Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago, set in Russia but filmed in places like Spain and Alberta. No matter. This great love story of a physician caught between his bourgeois marriage and the fiery activist Lara never pales. The use of color is so powerful and the cast includes Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Omar Sharif and a brief scene with Klaus Kinski. It even has an intermission.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller(1971)
This film somehow epitomizes the hazy 70s, even through it’s set in a muddy, remote mining town in the early 1900s. Mrs. Miller — Julie Christie again — is a madam in charge of the town’s prostitutes, and making a very good living at it. The three Leonard Cohen songs are a perfect fit. The final scene is heart-rending.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid(1969)
One reason I love it so much is knowing some of it was filmed in Mexico, where I lived for a while as a teenager and have been back many times. As with all of these movies, it has some terrific music and moments of utter charm. A young Robert Redford and Paul Newman make a great duo and Katharine Ross is their initial sidekick. It won four Oscars.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)
I could watch this every night. The cinematography is by Hoyte van Hoytema, with dozens of moments framed through a window or door, always peeping inward, its themes of deception and obfuscation. Its palette is muddy — olive and brown and not a moment of yellow or purple or red — except for a few grisly inevitable murders. Taken from the book by John le Carre, the cast is excellent, with Colin Firth, Gary Oldman, Toby Jones and Benedict Cumberbatch. It’s set in London and Budapest and Istanbul and Paris, so lots of international intrigue. Here’s an 8:18 video with some of its best scenes.
The Favourite (2018)
This is a weird film but also extraordinary — and won British actress Olivia Colman an Oscar for Best Actress as Queen Anne. The amazing Rachel Weisz is in it as is Nicholas Hoult (an interesting rematch since both were in “About A Boy” when Hoult was a child.) Set in the early 18th century, it’s a tale of endless palace intrigue.
All five of these are set in other eras — the Russian Revolution. the early 1900s, the late 1880, the earily 1800s and the 1970s. The costumes, lighting and production values are all excellent.
Ocean’s 8, 11, 12, 13
Pure escapist fun! Best to watch 11-13 before 8 so you’ll know who’s playing Rusty in 8 (Cate Blanchett) and know who Danny was. Eight is an all-women heist caper using Anne Hathaway to steal a lot of very good jewelry during the annual Met Gala (a real thing and filled with real people in the film.) I enjoyed seeing the lobby, cafeteria and a conference room at The New York Times in it — without a word in the credits. (I know the place well from freelancing for them and visits to my husband when he worked there.) 11-13 rely on the wit and charm and thieving skills of Danny Ocean and his sidekick Rusty (George Clooney and Brad Pitt), and their gang of fellow bad boys, set in Las Vegas but also Rome, Paris and Amsterdam. Much suspension of disbelief is helpful — but such a good time!
Life can feel so grim these days — an endless war in Ukraine. grocery and housing costs so high they leave you gasping in dismay, climate change…
We all need respite and comfort!
Three films I recently watched — two of them Oscar nominated for 2023 and one that won in its category — were such balm for the soul.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
sounds impossibly twee and saccharine and I studiously avoided it when it was in our local theater. I saw it on TV and was blown away with its low-key charm and humor and — how unlikely! — the presence of broadcaster Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes as one of its characters.
The plot is simple enough — a very small shell with (!?) one eye and shoes (!) and a very big heart finds his family suddenly all gone after the owners of the house they live in turn it into an Air B and B. The new resident, who is a real person and who is the maker of the film but also a main character in the film, gets to know Marcel and his grandmother Connie, whose bed (of course) is a powder compact and (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) speaks with a husky French accent. I won’t give it away but here’s a six minute clip.
The Elephant Whisperers
is a documentary about a married Indian couple and the two elephants they care for. It won the 2023 Oscar for Best Documentary Short Film and became the first Indian film to win an Oscar in that category. It is beautiful to watch. In Thailand I rode on an elephant’s neck , as the mahouts do, and it was one of my life’s happiest moments. Here’s the 2:40 trailer.
The Quiet Girl
is an Irish film mostly in Gaelic with subtitles, about a nine-year-old girl shipped off for the summer to live with a middle-aged distant cousin. It’s set in 1981, but feels like the 1960s, as Cait settles into her new life on a dairy farm, a quiet and lovely break from her abusive family and the latest screaming baby. Anyone who’s ever felt ignored by their family, or worse, and longed for an escape — and some true love — will recognize what a gift this long visit offers the girl.
In their own way, each film also addresses grief and the loss of a loved one.
In 1845, a young girl made this sampler…early creativity
By Caitlin Kelly
Back when I started this blog — 2009 (!) — one of my first and best-read posts was about the endless American fetish for “productivity” when creativity is really what drives most innovation, and certainly the arts.
As every blogger knows, blogging demands creativity! Ideas, some skill and the eternal optimism there might actually be an audience out there for us.
As readers here know, I only moved to the United States at the age of 30, so its cradle-to-grave obsession with work and being seen as obsessed with work — above all other pursuits (family, friends, health, a spiritual life, etc,) struck me, then as now, as weird. Yes, I know about the Puritan work ethic. But we’re not all wearing shoes with buckles or moving around by horseback and making our own soaps and clothing either…
In a country whose minimum wage pushes millions into poverty, millions will never find the time and energy and encouragement to savor creative pursuits, even for their own pleasure — cooking, knitting, crocheting, embroidery, woodworking, making music or visual art. American capitalism makes sure only the well-off have the leisure to do it without sacrifice — I still get a payment every year from Canada’s Public Lending Rights program, a sort of royalty system that pays authors for the library use of our books. It’s not a large amount, but is deeply meaningful to me, both because it democratizes access to our work and sends a powerful message to creators — you matter!
I don’t have children, but I do see the tremendous pressure American children face — to pass endless state tests, to do terrifying “active shooter drills”, to get into fancy and costly colleges.
None of which seem likely to foster creativity.
So I’m always in awe of creative people, some of whom manage to keep producing their work in the face of some serious odds.
Here’s a 9:07 video of actor Ethan Hawke talking about creativity; it’s gotten 5.2 million views.
“We’re educating kids out of creativity” says Sir Ken Robinson on this 2006 TED talk; it’s 19:12 minutes long and has received 74 million views, with lots of laughter and insight. “We need to radically rethink our idea of intelligence,” he says. Worth it!
Here’s one unlikely and interesting example of creativity — a book out May 16, 2023 from a San Antonio nephrologist whose Twitter threads on medicine were moving and powerful. Social media networks like Twitter, Instagram and YouTube have fostered and spread all sorts of creativity, from high schoolers to seasoned professionals.
We recently visited friends who worked with my husband at The New York Times for decades, one a photographer renowned for his portraits and his wife, a photo editor. Her father was an architect and her mother a textile designer; his father and grandfather were bakers.
I grew up in a home filled with all sorts of art — Inuit prints and sculpture, 19th c Japanese prints, Mexican masks, a Picasso lithograph — and all three of my parents (father, mother, stepmother) worked in creative fields: journalism, TV and film-making. So it feels natural and felt inevitable I’d work in some creative capacity, as I’ve done since my teens when I sold three photos as magazine covers in Toronto while still in high school.
But creativity requires many things some people never have:
silence
solitude
uninterrupted time to think deeply
a physical space in which to paint, draw, print photos in a darkroom, weave, sew
access to needed tools and materials
the disposable income to buy needed tools and materials
a larger culture that admires and celebrates creativity, whether family, school, neighborhood, country
skill sufficient to make something you might want to keep or sell
time, energy and spare income to learn and perfect those skills
good health and mental focus
encouragement!
My favorite book on the subject is the 2003 book The Creative Habit by American choreographer Twyla Tharp.
Whether by innate voracious curiosity or decades of working in journalism, my first instinct in response to almost everything I read, hear or watch is to ask….what’s missing?
It’s essential in that work to pay really close attention not only to what’s offered…but what isn’t being said? What does a long pause or silence in an interview mean? Why does almost every American national TV news report lack any useful or meaningful context? I routinely shout at the TV screen in frustration!
It might be a lack of diversity in sourcing — very common.
It might be sadly clear that the “news” item was simply a rewritten press release, also known as a “puff piece.”
It might be the reporter, editor and producer were too lazy or ignorant to dig deeper — like (!?) a recent report on the national nightly news from CBS that urged listeners to get vaccinated against polio (a good thing) but failed to even mention how polio is spread.
Or it might be the creators knew there was a minefield beneath the flowers — and decided to just let things lie.
This was immediately obvious to me while recently watching a new documentary about Leonard Cohen, a renowned Canadian singer/songwriter who died in 2016, but who has millions of fans worldwide. His life never lacked for drama — partnered with very beautiful women, one (Suzanne Elrod) who bore him two children, Lorca and Adam, spending six years in a Zen monastery outside Los Angeles, emerging to discover that a longtime friend and manager, Kelly Lynch, had robbed him blind, pocketing some $5 million of his earnings. She only got 18 months in prison — and he went out on tour at 79 (!) to make back his losses, which he did.
Here’s the thing:
I love his work.
I know many of his songs by heart.
I admire his art.
But to produce a documentary that doesn’t even speak to his children, or explain that maybe they wouldn’t speak on camera (!?) struck me at once as a huge oversight. It could not have been in error.
The film includes many musicians talking about their admiration for Cohen and his influence on them, from Judy Collins to Brandie Carlisle to Glenn Hansard.
As someone from an accomplished family, and parents who were devoted to their work, this hit hard. I’ve long wanted to write a book interviewing the adult children of highly successful parents, and not just “celebrities” like the Kardashians. I know that being the child of famous and successful parents can come at a very real emotional cost.
A little more candor here would have done the trick for me.
I don’t watch horror or animation or kids’ stuff, but probably watch five or more a week, mostly because I dislike most network TV and have seen most of Netflix’s offerings. We live a 20 minute drive south of an excellent indie art house, so I’m there sometimes two or three times a week to see something in the theater.
I’m going to rave today about three of my favorites:
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The English Patient and Days of Heaven.
Maybe not surprisingly, given my age, two of them are from the 1970s, a period I think produced some terrific films.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
It’s not your usual Western — filmed in Vancouver and Squamish, B.C.
The snow scenes are real.
It includes three Leonard Cohen songs, The Stranger Song, Sisters of Mercy and Winter Lady.
It took longer to edit — nine months — than to shoot.
From Wikipedia:
The film has received critical acclaim in the years since its release and earned an Oscar nomination for Christie in the Best Actress category. The film was deemed the 8th greatest Western of all time by the American Film Institute in its AFI’s 10 Top 10 list in 2008 and, in 2010, was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”.
Why does it resonate for me?
Visually, it really replicates the mud and squalor of a late 19th century frontier town and its rough and tumble economy.
Julie Christie is excellent as the lead, madam Mrs. Miller, and Warren Beatty as McCabe, trying to carve his fortune from the wilderness.
The final scene, for me, is also visually and emotionally unforgettable but also feels very much of the period…the 1970s and women’s emerging consciousness and economic power.
The English Patient (1996)
I happily re-watch it whenever it appears, bewitched by its locations (Tunisia, Italy), the gorgeous music, the passionate affair between Kristin Scott-Thomas (as Katherine Clifton, a bored/married Englishwoman) and Ralph Fiennes as Count Almasy.
It won nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Score, Best Cinematography, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress Juliette Binoche, who plays a French-Canadian nurse, Hana. If you’re a fan of the TV series Lost, it also stars Naveen Andrews as Kip, a Sikh soldier Hana falls in love with while nursing Almasy, the title character, burned badly in a plane crash, in an abandoned Italian monastery.
It has, for me, some of the most beautiful images ever captured on film: Almasy and Katherine flying over the desert in a biplane; their passionate affair conducted to haunting Hungarian choral music; the desert sky at night and, the best, Kip’s unlikely way to show Hana the frescoes in a nearby church — hoisting her high into the air holding a signal flare. She sways, awed and delighted. How romantic is that?!
I love its mix of love and horror, truth and deception, the unlikely connections between a Hungarian count and a Canadian nurse and a British wife and a Canadian spy, their lives thrown together in an unfamiliar time — World War II — and places.
There’s nothing about this film I don’t love.
Days of Heaven (1978)
Every frame of this film is a painting, thanks to astonishing cinematography by Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler and their unusual use of low light, natural light, firelight. Almendros, speaking to a a trade magazine about his craft, said he had to unlight every scene when arriving on location to shoot, since his Hollywood-trained crew assumed he wanted a lot more light than he did.
The music is by two of my favorites — legendary film composer Ennico Morricone and guitarist Leo Kottke.
It barely made money beyond its $3 million budget.
Yet, from Wikipedia:
Days of Heaven has since become one of the most acclaimed films of its decade,[11] particularly for its cinematography. In 2007, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.[12][13] It continues to appear in polls of the best films ever made, and appeared at #49 on a BBC poll of the greatest American films.[14]
It stars a young and ggggggorgeous Richard Gere as a worker fleeing a murder he committed in Chicago who flees with his partner, Abby, played by Brooke Adams, and his younger sister, to the plains of Texas (shot in Alberta.)
They arrive to work as farmhands for a wealthy owner, played by Sam Shephard, whose health is failing — they plan to grift him by having Abby marry and survive him.
Starting a new occasional series here, dedicated to cultural things I love — and hope to inspire you to check out as well: music, books. films, art and more.
Do you know the book, musical or movie of Mame?
If you’re below 50, probably not!
Written in 1955 by Patrick Dennis, it sold more than two million copies and stayed on The New York Times best-seller list for 112 weeks. Then it became a play, a musical and a film, nominated for six Academy Awards.
The 10 year old boy at its center — also named Patrick — is sent to live with his madcap aunt Mame, who defines fabulous; in the 1958 film, Mame re-decorates her apartment almost every scene.
I adore Mame, and its spirit of joie de vivre.
I know all the songs by heart and love singing along, although “My Best Girl” always makes me weepy.
From Wikipedia:
A June 1958 Los Angeles Examiner article named six different styles: Chinese, 1920s Modern, “Syrie Maugham” a French style named for writer Somerset Maugham’s wife; English, Danish Modern and East Indian. When the Upsons visit Mame, they run afoul of the Danish Modern furniture, which is equipped with lifts[5] The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Art Direction (Art Direction:Malcolm Bert; Set Decoration:George James Hopkins).
The costume design for the film, which includes outfits for Mame that coordinate with those sets, was provided by Orry-Kelly,[6] who had worked with Rosalind Russell on a number of films. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther observed: “The lavish décor of Mame’s apartment is changed almost as frequently as are her flashy costumes, and all of them are dazzling, in color and on the modified wide-screen
Ten reasons I adore Mame, and hope you will too!
— Although Patrick lands abruptly in her care after his father suddenly dies, she’s thrilled to now be taking care of him, not resentful.
— Her glamorous Beekman Place apartment is a froth of over-the-top fun and fantasy.
— That cigarette-holder!
— The characters are great, including lock-jawed snob Gloria Upson and gloomy Agnes Gooch.
— Mame can not stand snobbery!
— She reminds me so much of the wealthy, profligate Chicago-born heiress who was my late maternal grandmother, all raw silk turbans and custom-made raw silk muumuus and gold-topped canes and limo’s everywhere.
— Like me, Patrick is sent off to boarding school but treasures his visits with Mame.
— Despite moving in wealthy Manhattan circles, Mame is always urging Patrick to be curious and adventurous: “Open a new window, open a new door, travel a new highway you’ve never tried before…”
— She knows how to cheer everyone up, singing: “Haul out the holly, put up the tree…We need a little Christmas, right this very minute, candles at the window, carols at the spinnet!”
— She’s a figure we can all enjoy in our lives, whether we’re a lost little boy or a happy play, musical or film-goer. She stands the test of time.
But one I’m so happy to watch over and over again…
Filmed in London, Esrington (Durham) and in studio, it’s the story of a young working-class boy , played by Jamie Bell, who dreams of studying ballet, despite the initial anger and shock of his coal-miner father — broke, scared and out on strike.
“Ballet?!” he shouts (sounding like Bally)
“Boys do things like…football, wrestling!”
The film was made for a small budget of $5 million in only seven weeks, and they could only shoot during weekdays because of the actor’s young age — child labor laws!
It has since earned $109 million.
Bell had to endure seven auditions before finally winning the role — beating out 2,000 others!
A few reasons I love it so much:
If you love ballet and/or have studied it (as I did for years), it shows what discipline it really takes to even get started in this demanding art form as young Billy, then 11, learns turn-out and plies and arabesques.
2. Determination! Billy lives in a working-class neighborhood, surrounded by people whose dreams are usually small and local. It will take a lot of determination to break free, which he does.
3. How much a small boy misses his late mother. She has died young and there’s a lovely scene in the tiny kitchen where she appears to him again.
4. How the local, overwhelmingly macho ethos shapes a young boy — and what if you don’t fit the mold? His friend Michael, gay, is terrified Billy will reject him (set in 1984) and then what?
5. Why sometimes it’s someone far from your family who really sees you for who you are and will fight to make sure you get what you need — Mrs. Wilkinson, his ferocious local dance teacher.
6. The scenes of police chasing down striking coal miners — set to raucous tunes like the Clash’s London Calling — are both poignant and funny.
7. That opening scene with Billy bouncing on his bed!
8. Maybe my favorite scene of all — Billy and Mrs. Wilkinson on a car ferry, The Tees Transporter Bridge, while listening to Swan Lake as she explains the plot to him. The contrast between the industrial surroundings and the ethereal music is perfect!
9. The moment Billy is asked, at his audition for the Royal Ballet School, why he loves ballet…”I just disappear. It’s electricity.”
10. The final image of him soaring above the London stage, his father, brother and Michael there to watch him with pride.
And if you want to watch dancers in rehearsal — getting endless corrections to what already looks physically impossible! — check out the Australian Ballet’s Instagram feed.
There’s no way past it. If you’re going to read a blog written by a journalist…
The Devil Wears Prada
I’ve seen this 2006 film so many times I know much of the dialogue off by heart and always look forward to my favorite scenes.
It follows the trajectory of Andrea Sachs, a gormless fresh graduate, who is very serious about journalism, stuck in a first job — at a NYC glossy fashion magazine — she neither wants nor respects. It’s a job.
This one always hits me!
It’s set in Manhattan, with key scenes in buildings and locations holding some great memories in my own writing life.
It’s really about what it takes to pay dues, to go along and get along in a rough and unfamiliar environment.
The price of ambition.
There are some lovely scenes in Paris as well.
Lots of arguments about whether her friends are true friends, or people who have no clue what it really takes to get ahead in this brutally competitive industry.
Plus, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci and acres of gorgeous clothes and accessories.
It was made for $35 million — and has earned almost 10 times that since.
Spotlight
I know of no other film that so abundantly makes clear what it takes to do really slow, really detailed, really deep reporting work, aka investigative journalism. It won Best Picture for 2015 and richly deserved it.
It follows a real team of four reporters at the Boston Globe who dug up a rats’ nest of priest’s abuse. There are scenes that should be required viewing in every journalism class, like the one where Sacha Pfeiffer (played by Rachel McAdams) has to coax grim details from a male abuse victim.
No one who hasn’t done this work — and especially those who loathe and insult journalists — can really grasp the emotional intelligence (empathy, compassion, patience) it takes to get victims to share the stories that can, sometimes, create tremendous political and legal change.
I’ve watched this one many times and never tire of it.
It also makes very clear the tremendous pressure often placed on senior newsroom management by powers-that-be eager to shut down some unwanted attention.
And the military chain-of-command that still runs most newsrooms.
And the balls-to-the-wall determination it demands of reporters to keep chasing elusive answers.
Plus, again — Stanley Tucci!
Absence of Malice
This is an older one, from 1981, with Sally Field as a reporter and Paul Newman as the subject of her story.
Nominated for three Academy Awards, and written by a former newspaper editor, it addresses when, how or if a reporter should ever have a romantic relationship with someone they’re writing about it.
It also shows that speaking to “civilians” — regular people who don’t understand how journalism works — can wreak havoc on their lives.
Some of our collection of laminated press credentials….
All The President’s Men
Better known to those who love it as ATPM, this follows the Watergate scandal that brought down former U.S.President Richard Nixon, and the two Washington Post reporters — Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) — who broke the story after many months of reporting and a lot of internal and external doubt whether the story was true and verifiable.
Jason Robards is terrific as the Post’s patrician editor, Ben Bradlee, with his Gucci-clad feet on every desk.
It’s a total boy-fest, with almost no women involved in the editing or reporting, but still so worth watching.
For an entire generation of would-be journalists, Woodward and Bernstein were the ultimate role models.
The Paper
Hilarious!
Michael Keaton and Marisa Tomei — and Glenn Close — star in this send-up of New York City tabloid journalism. Having worked at the NY Daily News, I get it now!
If you want a glimpse of what newspaper tabloid life is like, this is it.
A Private War
This is a recent film, from 2018, about the legendary American foreign correspondent, Marie Colvin, played by the excellent British actress Rosalind Pike.
Colvin had already lost an eye covering the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka but never stopped worked in dangerous places.
She was killed while on assignment in Homs, Syria, Feb. 12, 2012.
Imagine just lying very still and looking up in silence
By Caitlin Kelly
Every time I post here I wonder how many of the 22,000+ (?!) followers WordPress tells me read Broadside actually finds the time to pay attention to anything I’ve offered.
The highest counts these days are maybe 200 or so views.
I admit to envying fellow Canadian David Kanigan — whose blog and life are very different from mine — and who consistently gets a lot more likes and comments on his blog.
This can now feel like shouting into the wind — a fruitless waste of my time and limited energy trying to capture anyone’s fleeting and overwhelmed and pandemic-weary attention.
But I still enjoy it and I really appreciate those of you who do make time to read, comment and share, so onward!
I thought of this as I recently listened to a Doors song 11 minutes and 48 seconds in length.
I’m a huge fan of music and film and books and it’s fascinating to consume older media that assumed, rightly, a much longer — and much less distracted — attention span.
Different pacing.
Different plot development.
Quieter scenes.
Fewer edits.
For amusement, I once counted every single image in the introductory credits to the HBO series about journalism — The Newsroom.
The difference between its initial 2012 opening credits — with 53 separate images in 1:29 and the 45 images of the 2015 season, in 1:07 — are striking. The second set are super quick jump shots, much more emotional, much more compelling — with Ron Rosen the editor.
One of my favorite film directors is American Kelly Reichardt, whose films move slowly and beautifully, often through a rural, timeless Oregon landscape.
I keep re-watching the 1968 film “2001”, also intrigued by how slowly some scenes unfold and how very little dialogue it contains.
It demands our sustained, often mystified attention — and amply rewards it.
No doubt our brains were wired very differently before the ’90s when we all started moving online, let alone the daily deluge now on social media.
I find it more challenging than ever now sit still for hours and just read.
I often wonder what it was like to live in the 18th century where domestic amusements were embroidery — slow! — or reading or playing a musical instrument. When a letter sent, sealed with wax, took days or weeks or even months to reach its reader. Then the reply.
What different brain chemistry they must have had!
Living through a pandemic and the useless political “leadership” that’s killed so many is bad enough — add to this grief and anxiety that absolutely rob us of the ability to stay focused and pay attention and retain a damn thing.
Broadside 