Blake Eckard’s films serve up an undiluted, deliriously potent drink. Not everyone will find it palatable. But if you are open to downing the cinematic equivalent of several shots of 190-proof Everclear, belly up to Intensely Independent’s bar and prepare for intoxication.
Flight, with its intoxicating blend of graceful beauty and adrenalizing daredevilry, was custom-made for cinema, which exults in movement—they are called motion pictures—and delights in vicariously transporting audiences to seemingly unreachable places.
Shuffling through the vaccination and microchip records, reading the myriad names, I sometimes smile with nostalgic fondness, but more often my eyes mist as I am reminded of the multitudes we have loved but lost.
No one—in either real or reel life—wants to confront the difficulties of aging, the imminence of dying. The point is best proved by Leo McCarey’s glorious Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), the most unbearably moving and resolutely unsparing work Hollywood has ever made about the elderly.
The Joads and their fellow Oakies may be today’s Orange County conservatives, but the labor struggles and political tensions made real in the pages of Steinbeck’s most famous book resonate 75 years later, and counting.
The Common Reader, a publication of Washington University in St. Louis, offers the best in reviews, articles and creative non-fiction engaging the essential debates and issues of our time.
The Common Reader goes to Chicago to check in with the Democratic Party.
