Scary Movies Haunt Me: I Take Them On!

 

Standing Up to Scary Movies

I Say "Boo!" to Impotence in the Face of Evil

I'm so small my big brother can toss me over his shoulders without missing a step. He has to carry me sometimes because I'm always barefoot and broken glass lines the path to the factory where Mommy works. There are eight of us in this tiny house, plus dogs and cats, but one bathroom. I'm the youngest so I don't get my own bed yet. I sleep under a green quilt tossed over the couch.

I am so scared I can't move. I barely breathe. My big brothers like scary movies and the only TV in the house is just a few feet away. I'm trying to sleep, but they're watching an old 1950s sci-fi flick. Martians vaporize Earthlings. A cop sights a UFO in our town. It made the national news. The anchor mispronounced our town's name, a Lenni Lenape Indian word meaning "sassafras." I quietly wait to be vaporized, and am surprised when I am not.

Lee 2023. New Kate Winslet Movie Dramatizes Lee Miller's World War II Photographic Career

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Lee 2023
A Fine Film Exposes As Much As It Hides

Lee is a new biopic about Lee Miller (1907 - 1977), an American-born fashion model turned photographer. Miller's most famous photo was snapped by LIFE photographer Dave Scherman. Miller is naked in a bathtub. As the viewer examines the photo, he comes to realize that there is a portrait of Hitler on the bathtub's edge, and filthy combat boots and an army jacket over a chair. Along with LIFE magazine's Margaret Bourke-White, Miller was one of only two credentialed women combat photographers during World War II. The photograph was taken on April 30, 1945, in Hitler's Munich apartment. Miller had begun the day photographing horrors at the newly liberated Dachau. Also earlier that same day, Hitler had committed suicide.

Multiple-award-winning actress Kate Winslet produced and stars. Winslet had been trying to get the film made for nine years. "It's hard to get a film made about a woman, and it's hard to get a film made as a woman," Winslet says. Alexander Skarsgard plays Roland Penrose, Miller's lover. Andy Samberg stars as Dave Scherman, Miller's colleague. Andrea Riseborough is Audrey Withers, Miller's editor at British Vogue. Josh O'Connor is Antony Penrose, son of Roland Penrose and Lee Miller.

Ellen Kuras, a cinematographer, directs only her second feature film with Lee. Veteran film composer Alexandre Desplat, winner of two Academy Awards, two Golden Globes, and two Grammys, composed the score. Lee's runtime is 116 minutes. It was released in the US on September 27, 2024.

Rottentomatoes gives Lee a 64% professional reviewer score and a 94% amateur reviewer score. Some reviewers dismiss Lee as a "paint-by-numbers biopic." Rex Reed is more enthusiastic. "Enough cannot be said about the film or Kate Winslet – irritating, admirable, challenging, sometimes unlikeable, always heroic – as she elevates the complex personality conflicts of Lee Miller into a cohesive, resplendent, three-dimensional whole."

I loved Lee. I was so intrigued that after the film I read about Lee Miller. What I discovered shocked and disturbed me. Now I want another movie. One that explores the richer, harsher, and ultimately more inspirational story that Lee is too afraid to address. The review, below, will provide a summary of the film. I'll close with an addendum that clues you in to the more difficult narrative I discovered that the movie refuses to touch.

Between the Temples 2024 with Jason Schwartzman Movie Review

 

Between the Temples 2024

A New Film Comments on Jewish Identity

Between the Temples is a 2024 traumedy feature film. "Traumedy" is a genre term for a film that mixes trauma and comedy. Between the Temples stars Jason Schwartzman as Ben Gottlieb, a depressed, middle-aged cantor living in upstate New York. He has retreated to the basement of a home belonging to his mother Meira and his mother's wife Judith (Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon). Ben's wife died over a year before the film begins. Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel) allows Ben to assume his cantor's chair in front of the congregation during synagogue services, even though Ben has lost his ability to sing. Carla O'Connor (Carol Kane) was, decades earlier, Ben's grade school music teacher. She is now his septuagenarian bat mitzvah student.

Between the Temples was directed and co-written by Nathan Silver. Silver has made low-budget independent films that play at film festivals rather than obtaining wide release. He has often featured friends and relatives in his casts. Between the Temples is an hour and fifty-one minutes long. It was released in the US on August 22, 2024.

Temples has a distinctive look. The film stock is color and it is grainy. Silver shot on 16 mm of "rare Kodak film stock … we pushed at two stops" to make the film "less contrasty and it kind of gave it this look of these Soviet films that we used as our our guide." Silver says he wanted the film to have an "analog" look, to mirror Carla, an older character who was in her prime back in the 1970s. The movie poster's New Spirit Condensed font is also a throwback to the 1970s, and the soundtrack includes Hebrew language songs by Boaz Sharabi, who was popular in Israel in the 1970s.

The camera is handheld and shots are often jerky. Shots focus tightly on human faces. In one scene all the viewer sees is a person's nostrils, lips, and teeth, as the character eats. In a low-budget film, such tight close-ups eliminate the need for set design.

Professional critics lavish the film with praise. Audiences not so much. Rottentomatoes awards Between the Temples a proud 86% score from professional reviewers. Amateur reviews at the site, though, average out to a failing 40% score.

Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans. Review.

 

Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans
Even if you've read many books on the topic, you'll want to read this one

I'm sitting on the couch, next to my brother Greg. I'm about five years old. The TV is our magical portal to old movies. The elegant dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The wit and romance of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. John Wayne's righteous action hero. But not today. I am witnessing horrors that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Naked, skeletal bodies stacked like firewood. Even worse, some still live, in a nether world that strips them of any concept of human dignity. They stare at the camera and at me and Greg sitting there on the couch in suburban New Jersey.

My mother is furious. "This is what they did to us!"

"Am I Racist?" Yes, Matt Walsh, You Are.

 

Am I Racist?

New Daily Wire Film Wants to be the next What Is a Woman?

Am I Racist? is a one-hour-and-forty-minute documentary from The Daily Wire. It was released in the U.S. on September 13, 2024. It stars Matt Walsh. Walsh had previously starred in the Daily Wire's 2022 documentary, What Is a Woman? That film interrogated trans extremism. Woman enjoys a high 78% score from professional reviewers at the Rottentomatoes site, and an even higher 86% score from amateur reviewers. For this reviewer, What Is a Woman? is a must-watch film that makes important points in sometimes funny ways. Am I Racist? is merely so-so. A key difference between the two superficially similar documentaries lessens the impact of the newer work. More on that, below.

Kevin Costner's "Horizon" and "Fly Me to the Moon" with Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum. Reviews.

 

Horizon and Fly Me to the Moon
Two films worth seeing in a theater

I want you to go to the movies. Specifically, I want you to see Horizon: An American Saga Chapter One and Fly Me to the Moon, even though both films received some bad reviews.

First, let me explain why I want you to go the movies at all. I'm a teacher, and I'm noticing among young people increasing difficulty in the ability to behave appropriately with other human beings. Families are smaller. Kids are growing up in Brutalist condo developments with no personality, no sidewalks, no churches, no downtown, no community centers. They spend their time alone staring at devices. Many young people today are effectively crippled. They don't make eye contact. They don't say, "Excuse me."

All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church by Christopher J. Kellerman, SJ. Book Review

 

All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church
Sometimes the best defense of Western Civilization is a thorough confession

When I was a kid, Western Civilization seemed as eternal as the ancient granite hills threading through my hometown. Christian churches were packed on Sunday. Even forms as minor and ephemeral as jokes and song lyrics assumed, in the hearer, proficiency in a cultural heritage from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare to NASA. You couldn't understand Cole Porter or Johnny Carson without having been baptized into this heritage. The day began with the Pledge of Allegiance and no one sat that out or even made rude comments or eye-rolls. Classroom walls featured silhouette profiles of Washington and Lincoln.

That everything had changed hit me hardest when I was teaching. I might casually allude to a line I assumed everyone knew, like, "In the beginning … the earth was without form, and void … and God said, Let there be light: and there was light." Or, I might use a phrase like "ex nihilo," or "fiat lux." And I would be met with complete incomprehension. The Vietnam War. Nothing. The Greek Miracle. Blank stares. Normandy Beach. Huh?