“Rock and roll is a joke and the joke is on anyone–performer or audience–who ever takes it for any more than that…” (p. 11) Writing about music, as I’ve said before, is tricky. The ones who do it well–P.F. Kluge, Sheila Kay Adams, Lee Smith–take it very seriously. So it follows that writing a parody about music, one that’s simultaneously … Read More
Review: My Old True Love by Sheila Kay Adams
Writing prose about music is, to borrow an analogy, dangerously close to trying to teach a fish to ride a bicycle. If you could say it in regular words, there’d be no need to sing it. And music can do some things far more efficiently than any other art form. For example, it takes over seven hours to tell the … Read More
Film Review: Over Home: Love Songs from Madison County
Way back in the early years of this century (being able to say that makes me smile), the spark of the idea that would become the Tufa struck me at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Also at that festival, I first heard Sheila Kay Adams at one of the midnight sessions, in a huge tent on a warm … Read More
The Indy Challenge: Melissa Olson on Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Today the four Indiana Jones films are released on blu-ray, along with a host of special features (including the awesome TV special, The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I’ve had on VHS for decades). To commemorate this, author Melissa Olson (Dead Spots) and I have agreed to swap blog posts defending the most maligned entries in the … Read More
Henry Jaglom and His Theatrical Families
Henry Jaglom’s newest film, Just 45 Minutes from Broadway,is an adaptation of his play about two generations of a Jewish theatrical family, and the secrets that come to light when one daughter brings home her “civilian” boyfriend. For those unfamiliar with Jaglom’s work, he uses an improvisational style that blurs the edge between actor and character so that, to a … Read More
Review: Road to Hell
There are a lot of film parodies, but not so many films that function as commentaries. Offhand, the best known example might be The Freshman, in which Marlon Brando both spoofs his Godfather persona and simultaneously creates a new, ironic character. Road to Hell, the new film by Albert Pyun, is a commentary film, in a sense. Michael Pare plays Cody, … Read More
“We two are now more than us two”: messing with the rhythm
Every good work of dramatic storytelling has an internal rhythm that we, as readers/watchers/listeners, subconsciously pick up on as we go further into it. It often means we’re able to sense where a story is going before we should, based on hints the storyteller didn’t even know s/he was giving us. Sometimes it can be obvious, like the ten individual … Read More
Review: Mean Guns (director’s cut)
There’s a theory that silent-era filmmakers were just on the verge of perfecting movies as a legitimate art form when sound came in and took away the primacy of the image. Suddenly what people said became just as important, if not more so, than what they did. A purely visual medium entered into an uneasy symbiosis with the spoken word. Occasionally, … Read More
Review: Death Watch
I met Ari Berk at the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association annual banquet a few months ago; we shared a table as we each signed 200 copies of our most recent books. He was a great person to have beside me for such a repetitive and time-consuming task, and when he told me about his new YA novel Death Watch, I … Read More
Review: Treasure Island (1990)
I’ve read Treasure Island many times, both for my own enjoyment and to my kids. It’s a great novel, an exciting story and a terrific basis for a film. But only one of the many film versions gets it right: 1990’s version for television, directed by Fraser Heston and starring his father Charlton and a young Christian Bale. For years this has … Read More