With the Iowa primary just ending, I was reminded of the movie “Butter” which I saw at the Napa Valley Film Festival in mid-November. “Butter” zooms in on the butter-carving contest made famous at the annual Iowa State fair. Butter sculpting is a very popular and competitive art in places like Iowa (with butter statues...
Happy New Year! –The Year of the Dragon
Happy New Year, everyone, and may some fire be breathed into your lives with good fortune, excitement, and the acceptance of transition and change!
I always like to look up the feng-shui and Chinese New Year after toasting with champagne a few days earlier. I found out that 2012 is the first black water dragon year in 60 years. (The other...
My Top Ten Movies for 2011–Reviewed, Not Necessarily New
Happy New Year–the Year of the Dragon in 2012! Most of all, I want to thank all of you for your comments and email!
With 2011 coming to an end, I wanted to take a look back at the movie reviews I wrote this year. I am an unabashed cinephile– 500 films (maximum allowed) in my Netflix queue with another 88 in my Instant Queue. So,...
“Becoming Santa”–Home for the Holidays
I saw this delectable morsel of an indie film at the Napa Valley Film Festival last month and had a chance to talk with Jeff Myers, the director, for a few moments afterwards. The backstory is fascinating but the movie stands on its own. “Becoming Santa,” reveals a lot more about the human spirit and generosity towards the tiniest among...
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers–The Most Famous Whistleblower of Our Time?
Nominated for a 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary, this past June marks the fortieth anniversary of the release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which was forced to stop publishing by a cease-and-desist order mandated by the Nixon administration. “The Most Dangerous Man in America” tells the inside story through...
“J. Edgar”—Investigating the Investigator
Based upon a script by “Milk” screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, and directed by Clint Eastwood, “J. Edgar” is a biopic of the controversial FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. In this spellbinding movie, Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Hoover, ages five decades, as he grows from an ambitious young law enforcer to the most...
