All I Need!

  I drove home after work on a Friday and had that feeling. It wasn’t anything concrete, just enough to occupy my thoughts over the weekend. On Monday, moments after sitting at my desk to begin another work week, my boss approached with that look. When I picked up my 12-year-old daughter from swim practice that afternoon and she settled into my car, I said, “I don’t want you to worry about this, but…” “You got laid-off,” she finished for me. It’s surprising how perceptive our children can be – or how transparent we, as adults, can be while worrying over a weekend. My eight-year-old daughter wasn’t the least bit surprised by this latest development in her parents’ lives either. In the meticulously controlled, observant, and deliciously subtle movie Wildlife , first time actor turned director Paul Dano takes us inside the experience of 14-year-old Joe as he observes his father Jerry and mother Jeanette. They’re a perfect little family of Js – although his mother hates her n...

  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...