Thanks, everyone, who hangs out here, who likes what I do, whether you’re an Elvis fan, a Supernatural fan, a general cinephile, a book-lover, or just someone who’s been checking in periodically for almost 16 years – WHAT? – I appreciate your presence, I appreciate your comments!

Here are some of the things I wrote in the year 2018, for many different outlets, as well as for my own site.

Movies/Television

I wrote the cover story for the Jan/Feb issue of Film Comment, on Paul Thomas Anderson’s marvel of a movie, Phantom Thread.

The situation would be intolerable to a more conventional or easily cowed woman, but Alma is not conventional, nor is she easily cowed. She is, if anything, stranger and more eccentric—more driven—than Reynolds. On the surface, her campaign to enter the inner sanctum of not just his house but his heart may sound like clichéd, even retro, material: the woman teaches the reticent man the glories of love. Audience members may want to intervene and tell Alma to forget this guy, find a man who will reciprocate. But Alma has other plans. She senses his sadness, senses his loneliness is so complete as to be absolute. How she goes about breaking him down is so “out there” it’s almost as radical as the frogs raining from the sky in Anderson’s Magnolia. Alma, at first glance a simple and easily flattered woman, reveals a will as intractable as Cyril’s. Cyril and Reynolds have met their match.

For Film Comment, I wrote about Charles Vidor’s harrowing and excellent Love Me or Leave Me, based on the life of jazz singer Ruth Etting, starring Doris Day (in a career-best performance) and James Cagney (a tour de force).

Day and Cagney are both so stripped bare here, and their scenes together shatter the conventional musical genre and move into truly harrowing territory. Their fights shiver with a real sense of danger. During one dreadful confrontation, Ruth screams at Martin, “Do you think you own me?” and the emotion is a tidal wave rising from Day’s toes.

For Rogerebert.com, I wrote about Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless as part of the site’s “If We Picked the Winners” Oscar series.

[Zvyagintsev] suggests that the universal disconnection with a coherent or shared sense of the past is a major factor in creating a “loveless” culture. What past are Russians talking about when they talk about the past? Is it czarist? Is it Stalinist? Or earlier Bolshevik? Is it the 1990s and the rise of the oligarchs following the crackup of the Soviet Imperium? Or is it Putin’s version of the past? As George Orwell famously wrote in “1984,” “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

This might be my favorite thing I’ve written all year, if only because it had been percolating so long, one of those things I kept thinking, “Some day I’ve gotta write that up. Before someone beats me to the … sucker punch.” My thanks to Scott Tobias at Oscilloscope Labs for taking my pitch, the kind of pitch you don’t hear every day: “I’d like to do a compare and contrast with Sucker Punch and Gold Diggers of 1933.” Tobias said, “Bring it.”

The two films operate in similar ways, using dizzying artificial worlds of fantasy as a bulwark against the harsh realities of life beyond the lights. But something happens in both films: the “fantasies” shine the spotlight onto urgent social and political concerns, and so they are not just escapes from reality. They expose reality.

Written 6 months before he died, my my review of The Last Movie Star on Rogerebert.com was turned into a celebration of Reynolds’ career, charisma, and gifts. It was an honor.

Reynolds, in his heyday, had an effortlessly masculine charm and a goofball sense of humor. If that killer combo could be bottled, it would be worth millions. But it can’t be bottled, an actor just has to have it. Burt Reynolds had it.

For Rogerebert.com, I reviewed Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited You Were Never Really Here, a powerhouse ride with a huge heartbreaker of a performance from Joaquin Phoenix.

The sound design is a living nervous breakdown. New York roars in a relentless cacophony of traffic, subways, horns. In one scene, Joe sits in a diner, and the air is filled with the conversations of people at other tables. He can’t filter any of it out.

For the March/April issue of Film Comment, I wrote about Thomas Mitchell’s terrifying performance in 1942’s Moontide. Not online, but you can order here.

Watching HBO’s 2-part Elvis Presley: The Searcher was like a long sometimes-mournful sigh of relief. A beautiful elegiac look at Elvis Presley’s musical journey, spiritual quest, and troubled reckonings with the reality of fame. I reviewed for Rogerebert.com.

By digging into the specifics of certain recordings, Zimny and his chorus of experts provide a great educational service. So, for example: after many people share memories of Elvis working on his vocal range while he was in the Army, when we hear the second single he recorded after returning home, the operatic “Now or Never,” there’s a huge payoff. Zimny led us here to the moment of vocal triumph. He’s showed us how to listen.

One of the great honors of my life was getting to interview Julie Dash, along with Chaz Ebert and Sam Fragoso, at Ebertfest, about her pioneering film Daughters of the Dust.

I also loved her anecdote about being shown Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin in a film class when she was young. At first, all the students were complaining about it audibly: “This is a silent film? It’s black and white! Oh, come ON!!” She said, “And after 10 minutes we all stopped complaining and got sucked into the story.”

For Film Comment, I wrote about experimental animator Mary Ellen Bute, and her film adaptation of James Joyce’s un-adaptable Finnegans Wake. (If ever there was a piece I was born to write …)

Bute uses her animation background to explore the text of Finnegans Wake: it’s a playful book, and so she does not take a somber approach. The action speeds up, slows down or runs backwards. She uses still photography and newsreel footage. Images repeat: eggs, light, water. Including Bute, six editors worked on the film, one of whom was a young Thelma Schoonmaker (it is her first credit). Bute has a lot of fun finding ways to theatricalize Joyce’s cacophony of words, inventing scenarios from which the language would emerge. And so a television news anchor gives a report on the events of “1132 A.D.” A vaudeville troupe performs “Tristan and Isolde,” complete with soft-shoe routine. Two loinclothed cavemen bicker. A politician rides in an elevator, giving speeches to an increasingly hostile crowd on every floor.

For Slant Magazine, I interviewed Dan Callahan about his wonderful book The Art of American Screen Acting, 1912-1960.

“Who I want to be as a person is Katharine Hepburn as she was seen by George Cukor, I want to emulate the George Cukor-Katharine Hepburn model for living. I want to be like that.”

For Rogerebert.com, I reviewed the extraordinary Beast, with a phenomenal central performance by the new-to-me Jessie Buckley.

[Buckley] is thrillingly alive, with waves of feeling erupting over her face, whether she’s struggling against the shame spiral her mother puts her through, or feverishly reaching for Pascal’s fly as they tryst in an empty forest glade. Sometimes she subsides into a strange blankness, or bursts forth in tremulous quivering need. When the film opens, Moll is already in a devastated state. Her family life is claustrophobic. Her mother is unpredictable, and yet so in control Moll cannot wriggle free. In an argument, her mother’s goal is to crush Moll’s sense of self and agency. Once she accomplishes that (and it’s not hard), she shifts abruptly, saying, “Let’s be friends again.” With all of the terrors in “Beast,” the most frightening thing may be the mother-daughter relationship.

I didn’t like On Chesil Beach at all, but reviewing the film for Rogerebert.com gave me a chance to talk about one of my pet peeves, the idea that “the book is the book, and the movie is the movie, review the movie, not the book.” It’s so lazy.

If anyone is to blame in McEwan’s book, it is a repressive society, so freaked out by sex it keeps everyone in the dark about the most basic human functions. On Chesil Beach is not peak McEwan, but the tone of the book is key to why it works. How do you transfer that tone into a film? How do you put across the proper sense of distance so that the characters are not just individuals, but representative of a time and place, the pre-sexual revolution 1960s in England? Ian McEwan, who wrote the screenplay for the film, directed by Dominic Cooke, has not solved this problem. The movie is fairly faithful to the book (except for a couple of awful invented scenes at the end), and yet so much is lost in the transfer.

For Rogerebert.com, I reviewed Jim McKay’s fantastic En el Séptimo Dia, a film about 7 days in the life of an undocumented immigrant trying to keep no less than 10 balls in the air.

“En el Séptimo Dia” makes its points powerfully, even more so since the set-up is so simple. Even better, its third act is as thrilling as anything in a traditional sports movie. McKay’s control of tone and rhythm is in high gear, creating a work both thought-provoking and hugely entertaining.

For Rogerebert.com, I reviewed Eugene Jaricki’s The King, about Elvis, cars, America, the economy, the American white underclass, Trump, and about 5,000 other things. It really doesn’t know what the hell it’s trying to say. Maybe it’s not trying to say anything. I disagree with so much of it. But it was a fascinating ride.

Sometimes the conversation is about Elvis. Other times it’s about the minimum wage, or the economic devastation of Detroit, post-car-industry. As if that weren’t enough, a parade of talking heads weighs in, each with their own particular take on Elvis, negative, positive, ambivalent. No one view is prioritized. This is not a work of hagiography (although, on some level, it is. What other cultural figure could even take being the subject of a documentary like this?)

I’ve missed doing Supernatural re-caps, but my freelance career has just been too busy. I managed to squeeze a couple in this year. First one is Season 3’s “Bedtime Stories.”

Sam and Dean are the saviors of children, but on a subtextual level, they are those children in peril, they are those siblings lost in the woods, threatened on every side, betrayed by the adults who were supposed to care for them. The mood of the episode is light, airy, fun, even with its horror. But underneath, you can’t get away from the fact that Sam and Dean were children in a fairy tale growing up, and as men they are doing the best they can but they are deeply marked by that trauma.

Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace was one of the best films of the year. I reviewed for Rogerebert.com.

These two actors are so in sync, so mentally connected, you believe totally they are father and daughter, you believe they’ve been living in the woods for months, maybe even years. The intimacy between them is so palpable it comes with great anxiety about what might be waiting for them outside the forest. Granik roots her tale in reality, focusing on the details of their lives. It is like they are one being.

I re-capped the unfairly maligned “Red Sky at Morning”, the Season 3 episode of Supernatural featuring a ghost ship, an angry one-handed pirate, Bela, and sexual shenanigans.

Sometimes you feel like Dean could go either way. Or both ways. Or all ways. His sexual orientation is “open for business.”

For Film Comment, I wrote about High Society (it was part of their “50 States” programming, so I wrote about it from the perspective of a Rhode Islander, which was so random and fun).

Throughout the film, jazz is joked about or demeaned by other characters. The society snobs turn their noses up. Jazz is uncivilized (read: African-American). How could Dexter Haven, one of their own, reject his position in society to write jazz songs? And so “That’s Jazz” is his moment of triumph.

Making my debut in Sight & Sound, I wrote about Joan Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays for their summer “Flick Lit” issue. Not online, but you can buy a print edition here.

Eighth Grade is, astonishingly, Bo Burnham’s directorial debut. It would be great if this puts to bed the lie that men cannot imagine their way into the lives of women (or girls, as the case is here). Of course they can. And vice versa. Of course women should make their own stories. But some of my favorite female characters have been written by men. So much of art is about empathy. At any rate: I reviewed Eighth Grade for Ebert.

Bo Burnham knows that of all the terrors in this world, there is nothing quite as terrifying as being a shy 8th grader, attending a birthday party for the most popular kid in school.

For Film Comment, I wrote about actress Dorothy Malone (who passed away early this year).

There’s one scene where she stands in the middle of a party, wearing a black gown and holding a drink, surrounded by couples. She looks utterly broken. It takes nerves of steel to give a performance like this.

For Rogerebert.com, I reviewed Cocote, directed by Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias, a film that challenges every convention of filmmaking you can think of. This was a difficult one to write, because it was hard to even discuss the film, but I’m happy with how it turned out.

De Los Santos Arias switches from black-and-white to color and back. Images repeat: a black-and-white shot of Alberto’s face as he whizzes along on his motorbike, trees above him, sun flaring out the lens. He moves from the modern capital back in time, to a place with no electricity, let alone limpidly peaceful swimming pools. Television footage sometimes interrupts the action: a man exorcises himself with great panache, an old man tells a reporter about how his rooster said the words “Christ is coming.” Alberto is pained by what he sees as a credulous and lost world.

For Rogerebert.com, I reviewed We the Animals, which I really liked a lot.

The “we” in “We the Animals” are the three brothers, barely individualized at first. They are often all in the same frame at the same time, curled up in their bed together, staring out the window, running through the forest. They are mostly shirtless, their bodies silhouetted against the sun, like identical black paper cut-outs. When we meet up with the family, the brothers are already seasoned veterans in surviving their parents’ unpredictable relationship, as it whipsaws between rage and tenderness.

If I have been wanting to write the Sucker Punch piece for about 5 years, then I’ve wanted to write the following piece for about 20 years, and I finally got a chance to: I wrote about the final scene and final shot in Shampoo – my favorite final shot in all of cinema – for the October issue of Sight & Sound. Not online, but you can buy a print version here.

For the September/October issue of Film Comment, I wrote about Tamara Jenkins’ wonderful film Private Life. Not online, but you can order a print version here.

God, I loved A Simple Favor. I reviewed for Rogerebert.com.

Kendrick is so awkward you yearn for Stephanie to just relax, but her awkwardness is why the performance is so funny. And Blake Lively is the reincarnation of Julie Christie in her best work in the 1960s and ’70s: ruthless and charming, sexy and detached, a completely destabilizing presence to men and women alike.

For Rogerebert.com, I reviewed Nappily Ever After, which features one of my favorite acting moments of the year.

And about that scene where Violet shaves her hair off: Here’s where actress and director come together, where Lathan is truly a co-creator. A lesser director might have edited the scene up into small fragments, showing Violet going from a full head of hair to no hair in a montage, holding back the “full reveal” until the end. Instead, Al-Mansour places the camera in one spot, and Lathan stares right into it as though it’s a mirror. She then shaves her entire head. It takes a while. Al-Mansour is not impatient. Violet goes through every emotion under the sun as she shaves her head. She weeps. She gasps with terror as she watches her hair fall away. She bursts out laughing. Sometimes she laughs and cries simultaneously. She’s also wasted. She goes through a catharsis so extreme that by the end of it, she is wrung dry. So are we.

One of the treats of the year was reviewing All About Nina for Rogerebert.com. Mary Elizabeth Winstead was phenomenal. This is my kind of performance.

Winstead does not hold back in portraying Nina’s more unsympathetic characteristics, her harshness, her horrible choices, her refusal to be vulnerable. Winstead does not keep one eye on us in the audience, hoping we will find her character “sympathetic.” She is beyond those concerns as an actress. She goes where Nina goes. This is a major performance.

Rupert Everett’s film The Happy Prince (which he directed and starred in) is a heartbreaking look at Oscar Wilde’s three final years. I reviewed for Rogerebert.com.

In an early scene, Wilde lounges in a grubby Parisian bed, staring with post-coital appreciation at the naked teenage prostitute standing by the window. Wilde moans, almost rapturously, “Our purple hours are sullied by green notes.” The boy smiles over at Wilde, accepting the older man’s gaze without judgment. Everett’s tone is partly regretful about the “green notes” and the “sullying”, but there’s a sharp note of relish in it, too. Maybe “purple hours” are best when backgrounded by squalor. It’s an extraordinarily textured moment, one of many in the film: it opens up its mysteries the longer you think about it.

For Film Comment, I wrote about The Canterville Ghost (my second piece in a row about – sort of – Oscar Wilde).

In his wildest dreams Oscar Wilde could never have imagined that an adaptation of his story would involve Charles Laughton straddling a gigantic unexploded mine as it’s dragged across the countryside by an American jeep.

For Rogerebert.com, I reviewed one of the best films of the year, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning.

“Burning” takes place in a world of fluctuating and amorphous borders, invisible yet pressing in on the characters. Jongsu’s village is on the border of North Korea, where the air is pierced with shrieking propaganda from a loudspeaker across the hills, creating a sense of emergency among the gentle pastoral landscape, like some attack is imminent, like something dreadful lurks beyond the horizon. Haemi’s cat is literally Schrodinger’s cat, caught in a borderland between being and non-being. The food vanishes, the litter box is full, but the cat never manifests. The phone rings repeatedly at Jongsu’s farm, but no one’s on the other end. Just empty space and dead air.

For Rogerebert.com, I did a roundup of the Indie Memphis Film Festival. I was a juror in the Hometowners category (films about Memphis, by Memphis filmmakers).

Although we loved everything we saw, our choice for best Hometowners Feature was unanimous. “Rukus,” directed by Memphis native Brett Hanover, is a queer coming-of-age story, I suppose, but beyond that, the film defies easy classification. Filmed over a 10-year period, “Rukus” blends documentary with fiction, and Hanover plays himself throughout (or versions of himself). Hanover details his fascination with the Furries subculture, and how that subculture introduced him to a mysterious kid from Florida who went by the online name “Rukus.” Structured somewhat like “Citizen Kane” at first, Hanover goes on a quest to find out more about Rukus, all as he himself deals with issues surrounding sexuality and identity. There isn’t a cliched frame in “Rukus”; it’s a singular vision.

The highlight of my year (along with my trip to Croatia) was giving a talk on Elvis’ movie career at The Circuit, the Memphis movie theatre Elvis used to rent out. My talk was introduced by Robert Gordon. To say this was a high watermark is to completely understate the situation.

Elvis is never the sexual aggressor in the Elvis Formula Movies. He is chased around by women in bikinis and in the end he has to choose. Or – as in the final scene in Spinout in 1966 – which has to be seen to be believed – he kisses each of the 3 candidates, all of whom are in wedding gowns, and then looks right in the camera and says, “I’m still single.”

For the L.A. Times, I reviewed Karina Longworth’s excellent book Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood.

Depending on whom you listen to, Hughes was a villain, a genius, a madman, sometimes all three simultaneously. His Hollywood career, in particular, is difficult to pin down. He strolls through so many Hollywood memoirs he takes on Zelig-like proportions. Is there anyone he didn’t meet, or date, or lock into a bungalow making her wait for her big break?

I interviewed director Alexander Baack about his beautiful and emotional new rom-com, You & Me, starring his wife (and co-screenwriter) Hillary Baack. Our interview ran the gamut, from Sally Struthers to D.D. Jackson, to my brother Brendan, to the issue of disability representation in film. You can rent the film on iTunes and elsewhere. It’s lovely.

“If you look up any article advocating for disabled actors representing themselves onscreen, and then you read the comments – the comments are shocking. People are not only resistant but angry at the idea. Hearing actors are cast to play deaf all the time, and in the deaf community it’s almost akin to blackface. They call it “deafface,” and they’re putting up with it less and less.”

I really loved Never Look Away, from German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, loosely based on the life of German painter Gerhard Richter. I reviewed for Rogerebert.com.

The more I think about “Never Look Away,” the more I think about it in terms of what it has to say about art and artistic expression, especially for those living in a totalitarian society. Art is always in the crosshairs. Art must be controlled: what can and cannot be said, as well as how things must be said. Ideologues demand that art should be uplifting, art must carry the ‘correct’ message, art must abolish ambiguity. What on earth would happen if artists were free to make the art they want to make? What would happen if it were left up to the viewer to decide the meaning?

I wrote the booklet essay for Arrow Video’s release of Woody Allen’s Another Woman, starring Gena Rowlands, reprinted on my site.

What is most extraordinary about Rowlands’ performance is the difference between Marion and the characters she played in her husband’s films, lonely outsider Minnie in “Minnie & Moskowitz,” Mabel, shattering into a psychotic break, in “A Woman Under the Influence,” tough-talking gun moll Gloria in “Gloria,” the desperate abandoned Sarah in “Love Streams,” and nutty alcoholic actress Myrtle in “Opening Night” (Worthwhile noting that in “Opening Night”, a film about a woman confronted by perhaps hallucinatory former and future selves, Myrtle is in the process of rehearsing a play for its Broadway opening, a play called “The Second Woman”.)

For Arrow Video again, I wrote the booklet essay for their release of Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. Also reprinted on my site.

When Ivor Novello entertains the guests at the piano with contemporary songs (the real-life Novello was also a composer), the reactions range from smiling tolerance to outright scorn. But the servants, drawn to the music, drift upstairs, loll on the dark staircases, huddle in nearby rooms, in a reverie of rapt listening. They are the future.

I cannot get Vox Lux out of my mind. I reviewed for Rogerebert.com.

There are many long scenes of people talking to each other, Celeste and her daughter, Celeste and Eleanor, Celeste and her manager. There’s not an uninteresting moment in the whole thing.

For the Criterion Collection, I wrote (and narrated) a couple of video-essays for their Ingmar Bergman’s Actors series. Two – one on Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, and one on Ingrid Thulin – are now up on the landing page (one more still to launch). Go and watch and listen – they did a gorgeous job (as usual).

For Rogerebert.com’s 10 Best Films of 2018, I wrote on Alfonso Cuaron’s celebrated Roma.

Surrounding Cleo is a world of political upheaval, seething student protests, marital strife, economic stresses, and cops in riot gear. In another film, these events would be center stage, but in “Roma,” they drift in the background, seen through windows, heard through open doors, as Cleo strolls by, or around, trying to manage her own life, enduring stress and doing her best.

2018 In Memoriam

Actress Peggy Cummins. I wrote on her performance in Gun Crazy.

Cummins’ most frightening moment in Gun Crazy is not during the scenes where she manipulates Barton sexually and emotionally, or when she suddenly pulls a gun out on some unsuspecting citizen. Her most frightening moment is the chilly look she gives to Bart’s sister, while the duo is hiding out at her house.

Singer Dolores O’Riordan. Brief post here.

The Cranberries weren’t just huge. They were everywhere.

Actress Dorothy Malone, whom I wrote about for Film Comment later in the year (see above), and also on my site in tribute.

Her nameless character in The Big Sleep is one of the few truly liberated women in cinema.

Naomi Parker Fraley, the real-life inspiration for the famous Rosie the Riveter poster. I wrote about her on my site.

In March, 1942, a photo went out over the wire service of a woman in coveralls, hair wrapped up in a bandana, working on the factory floor at the Naval Air Station in Alameda, California.

Semper Fi, character actor R. Lee Ermey. Brief post on my site.

Casting AS storytelling: what Ermey presents IS the story. And he knows it in his bone marrow.

Editor Anne V. Coates, responsible for one of the most famous “cuts” in all of cinema, died this year, after an extraordinary six-plus-decade career. I had the great honor to write the narration for the tribute reel played at the Governors Awards when she won a Lifetime Achievement Oscar last year. I wrote about her on my site.

Coates’ work as an editor is so legendary and so respected, Scorsese cast her as an editor in The Aviator, briefly seen going through a mountain of film, wearing a teal-green/silver dress.

Legendary journalist/novelist Tom Wolfe. Post on my site.

That is what Tom Wolfe did in his first major piece “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” a massive 50,000 word essay on a custom car show he attended in the early 1960s. He saw that something was happening, something seismic, a “something” no one was paying attention to. He saw that these so-called mechanics who created souped-up tailfinned cars were artists, as creative, as radical as Mondrian and Paul Klee and etc. and etc. And yet the New York art world would never, in a trillion years, consider a tail-finned tangerine-colored car a work of art. Tom Wolfe said, in 50,000 words, not so fast.

Elvis Presley’s first drummer, and recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, D.J. Fontana. Post on my site.

On “Jailhouse Rock” I love the bluntness of those opening double drum-beats, repeated. Classic! And he just keeps going with it. The underlying structure is really firm – necessary because in that song Elvis is on a rager. Fontana helps to allow him to do that.

Is any screenwriter more imitated than Shinobu Hashimoto, who died this year at the age of 100? Post on my site.

Rashomon is one of the most influential scripts ever written – especially when you consider how much it has been imitated, and how Rashomon itself – the concept of one story being told from many different points of view – has worked its way into the common lexicon.

The Queen of Soul. Post on my site.

What would the 20th century – and the 21st – be without her? Our world is incomprehensible without her. There’s that great quote about how heroes are those who “displace” things, the way a gigantic ship displaces water. Aretha Franklin was a great “displacer.’ Before, she wasn’t there. And then … she was there.

Great character actress Barbara Harris. Post on my site about the famous final scene in Nashville when she – a peripheral character – takes center stage.

The film ends with her. It is one of the great scenes in American film, and Altman – who tended to find his films as he shot them – knew that he had found his ending, found the scene that would continue on through the credits roll. You may think all along that Albuquerque is silly, or delusional, or maybe just a starry-eyed floozy. It doesn’t seem like she could be a “player” at all among the Nashville elite. But when her “chance” appears … she’s ready.

Along with my review of The Last Movie Star (see above), I wrote a tribute to him when he died, and I also wrote a short piece about how Reynolds used his angles like a supermodel.

People mention [his performance in] Boogie Nights all the time, and yes, it was great to see him play a role with some substance. But unfortunately it’s indicative of a tendency in the critical world to gravitate towards the “serious” as more worthy, less embarrassing to love. Well, I don’t subscribe to that.

Broadway superstar Marin Mazzie. Way too young. It’s tragic. Voices like hers don’t come along that often. Post on my site, highlighting one of her live performances.

She has clearly worked on the song – but the performance shows the song working on her (she allows it to work on her), and the implications of the lyrics grow more and more powerful for her.

Great character actor Scott Wilson. He will be missed. Post on my site.

Good character actors are like clutch hitters or closing pitchers. You gotta come up BIG and you have to do it under pressure with very little time. There are many scenes in G.I. Jane showing her struggles to prove herself, to keep up with the men, to break down stereotypes… but in that scene with Scott Wilson you see what she – and all of us – are really up against. That’s how you play a scene.

A staple in my childhood home, Hee Haw host Roy Clark. Post with tons of clips on my site.

I had no idea what he was famous for. Later, I would learn.

Actress Michele Carey. Post on my site.

I cherish her for her performance in Live a Little, Love a Little, a totally forgotten film, one that is – as Jeremy Richey says – ripe for rediscovery.

Croatia Travelogue

My trip to Croatia was “the substance of things hoped for.” I wrote it up in moment-to-moment detail in a series of picture-heavy posts on my site. I will never forget it.

Miscellaneous

Here are a number of pieces I’ve written on my site.

35 Random Facts About Me

Essay on one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen.

Mitchell and I discuss Barbra Streisand and Bette Davis.

Post on Bruce McGill, one of my favorite actors.

Transcript of Mitchell’s monologue on “The Tao of Barbra,” leading up to the release of the new A Star is Born.

On Alain Delon: Eyes so deep there’s no bottom.

On influential acting teacher and director Erwin Piscator.

Post on Ingmar Bergman’s 100th birthday.

Post on choreographer and director Bob Fosse.