brainsplotch

After a little trepidation based on its middling reviews, we went to the cinema to see Springsteen : Deliver Me From Nowhere . Perhaps due to my lowered expectations, or maybe because I'm just a pushover who goes to the movies WANTING to like what I've paid to see, or possibly because it actually IS a good movie, I ended up enjoying Springsteen : Deliver Me From Nowhere . (I will henceforth simply refer to it as Springsteen ). From what I gather, the main complaints about Springsteen  is that it doesn't have enough music and that it falls prey to rock biopic cliches. First, about the music: I don't agree with those criticisms. It has just enough music. The movie is, among other things, about Bruce's creation of the Nebraska album. He has finished the 1981  River tour and is renting a house in Colts Neck, NJ, getting inspiration from Flannery O'Connor, the Terence Malick movie  Badlands, reading   microfilm newspaper accounts of the real-life murders that ...

It only took us a month and change, but we finally saw One Battle   After Another in the theater. For anyone not in the know, it's the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie--based in part on Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland --that has received mainly rapturous reviews. It is deserving of the praise. It is a propulsive rollercoaster ride of a movie that doesn't feel as long as it is (162 minutes). I only looked at my watch one time, which is pretty good for me in a long film. I'm not sure if I should bother with a plot synopsis since that is easily available elsewhere, but basically, Leonardo diCaprio stars as a grizzled, burned out, pot-smoking, ex-radical revolutionary who is suddenly forced into his old life to find his kidnapped daughter. In the process, he and she are pursued by various nefarious forces, including Sean Penn as a heavily muscled, severely uptight white supremacist military weirdo named Col. Steven J. Lockjaw. It's a hilariously ridiculous ...

Here are my instant reactions--before my opinions are sullied by Letterboxd and/or movie podcasts--about the 1955 movie The Night of the Hunter . I had never seen it, though I knew of its existence for many years. This is not a blow-by-blow review of the movie, and I will try hard not to give any spoilers for the movie (even though it's 70 years old) The Night of the Hunter was Charles Laughton's one and only directorial turn and he nails it. I have read that Robert Mitchum has taken at least some credit for direction, but since the official credit goes to Laughton, I will extend my accolades to him. As for Mitchum, he is eerie and terrifying as the sinister, greedy preacher Harry Powell, who will do anything to get his hands on the stash of cash he knows is somewhere in or near Willa Harper's (Shelley Winters) house. This movie has to be considered one of the first psychological horror movies, though it's not straight-up horror. In fact, in its final 15-20 minutes, it ...

Okay friends, readers, countrymen (and non-countrymen), this should be it for Baltimore posts. I absolutely need to get this written and out there before my short-term memory goes on the blink. So let me talk about some highlights from Tuesday, October 21. With many of the Baltimore museums closed on Monday and Tuesday, I decided I'd have to find something else to do. I saw something on my phone about Billie Holiday murals in the city (as Billie Holiday, though born in Philadelphia, grew up in Baltimore--and had a difficult childhood to say the least). So I ventured out to find these murals, headed east on Pratt Street and then north on Caroline Street. I walked and walked, headed away from the "touristy" area until I came upon the short and utterly nondescript Billie Holiday Court, which seemed little more than a gray, weedy alley with no murals to speak of. "What the hell?" I consulted with my trusty Galaxy S22 and discovered to my chagrin that I went to the e...

When I left off, it was Monday and I had bought my brand new Orioles hat at the Camden Yards shop. At this point, I was ready to head back to the hotel after all the walking I'd done. So I trudged back, bought a coffee from the Starbucks on Presidents Street across from the Marriott, and rested in our 23rd floor hotel room. (I need to make a correction from my previous post: I did not, in fact, get coffee prior to my excursion because the order ahead didn't seem to be working on the app and heaven forbid I should actually have to go IN the Starbucks to order. And yes, it's also incredibly lame that I'm addicted to a corporate chain like Starbucks in the first place. I will own this terrible personality flaw).  I spent the afternoon alternating between napping and reading the new book about Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run album ( Tonight in Jungleland ). Here's another digression: the Marriott is on Aliceanna Street. Aliceanna has to rank as one of my favorite s...

I left off with our first day in Baltimore, so I'd better get back to this before I forget what we did. Sunday morning, we had some time to kill before L's conference began at 2:00 PM, so we walked from our Marriott Waterfront hotel to the Walters Art Museum, about 1.5 miles. One never knows quite what to expect on a long walk in a city they've never been to, and Baltimore's reputation isn't that great, but the walk was just fine. (And as it turns out, our time in Baltimore was quite pleasant. I try hard not to allow the reputation of a city color the way I approach it as a visitor. Baltimore and St. Louis, two cities that are perceived as "dangerous," have actually become two of my favorite places). The Walters Art Museum has, as of our visit (and this writing), a fascinating temporary exhibition on ancient Egyptian animal mummies. Little did I know that Egyptians wrapped such animals as tilapia and crocodiles into mummies. The mummies are elaborately wra...