All I Need!

  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...

  I’ll be using this blog to post all of my extended pieces of writing related to cinema and my life and how the two intertwine. Mostly new essays and reviews, but I’ll also share favorite bits from my book See You in the Dark: Two Decades of my Cinephilia in North Dakota . What follows – this inaugural post – is that book’s general introduction:   I select films for the Cinema 100 Film Society, a non-profit organization located in Bismarck, ND, and I’ve usually seen the films before we screen them, several times. Often, I’m mostly interested in our audience’s reactions as the lights go down. I’ll sit in the fourth row (why not the first row you ask? Because I’m not crazy I say) and occasionally turn around and watch the people. Have you ever done that? It’s a beautiful sight, hundreds of eyes all focused on the same images and in each of those eyes, you see the images flickering back at you. It’s like watching hundreds of versions of the film, each being perceived jus...