All I Need!

  Of swords and hands - Kill Bill Are my tears due to the greatness of Kill Bill or the cumulative effect The Bride’s journey has had on me over the years or my having had kids of my own? After The Bride has triumphed over O-Ren Ishii – her greatest rival – in the falling snow, I’m unable to move. When Bill wonders if she knows her daughter is still alive, I weep. As The Bride follows her path of revenge towards Bill, she charts a classic trajectory of going after what she wants, first the wrong followed by the right way. Duels in wintery Japanese gardens are typical of what happens to heroes at the midpoint of their journeys, halfway to discovering the wrongness of their ways. For The Bride, it’s an empty, unsatisfying, false victory. Watching her beaten and bloodied figure collapse on a bench, her sword falling from her hand, I’m unable to move because I read her thoughts. O-Ren deserved to die, but not by having the top of her head sliced off from six feet away by a sharp...

  The women’s revenge – Reservoir Dogs “Let me tell you what ‘Like a Virgin’ is about. It’s all about a girl who digs a guy with a big dick,” Tarantino’s character says before the movie fades-in from black to reveal a group of men sitting around a table in a diner. He continues with his analysis of the meaning of Madonna’s lyrics. It’s an interpretation only a dick could imagine. The opening scene continues with a discussion over whether waitresses deserve to be tipped. This misogyny continues throughout the movie, relentlessly. The one woman on-screen is thrown from her car. A young black woman is described as being one of the victims of the botched hold-up. This is before Tarantino wrote memorable roles for Uma Thurman, Mélanie Laurent, and Margot Robbie. It’s a movie about men doing men stuff and it ain’t pretty men stuff either. The movie plays-out in one location, in real time, the amount of time it takes a man to bleed to death, punctuated by flashbacks filling us in ...

  The Netflix Original movie I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a movie perfect for streaming. It’s intimate, character-driven, and begging to be experienced more than once. The movie centers on two characters – Lucy (Jessie Buckley) and Jake (Jesse Plemons) – and the chemistry (or un-chemistry) between them is mesmerizing. The movie follows a few hours of their lives together on a road trip date to meet his parents on their family farm. Every awkward moment between Lucy and Jake is a first blind date moment stretched to eternity. They met during an uncomfortable social moment in a restaurant – it seems (it’s one of their meet-less-than-cute stories) – and they’re bound together by her inability at that time and ever since to say “no.” In the first words we hear, she’s rehearsing break-up words in her head. Will she ever be able to verbalize them to him? He later reacts as if he can hear her interior words. Is he telepathic? (There’s a whole different reason for it in the sour...

  I wrote this review in 2007 for a small newspaper called The Prairie Independent . It’s still one of my favorite things I’ve written. It’s also a good example of mixing movie writing and memoir – my ideal mode.   When I was a kid, the next door neighbors were odd. They didn't leave the house much. He was a pianist, she a housewife. One night, I awoke at 3:00 a.m. and heard a faint popping sound. I went back to sleep. In the morning, my mother was distraught and police cars were everywhere. The housewife had shot the pianist dead during the night. It came out that he had been abusing his wife for years, gradually building over time, until she was finally pushed over the edge. But why did they continue to live in this situation? Why didn't she seek help or move out? They remained cut off from the world, until something really bad finally happened. In Paranormal Activity , a young woman, Katie, lives with her boyfriend Micah. After moving in together, she shared with hi...