“Top Gun: Maverick,” the second movie in the now-franchise, broke the Memorial Day weekend record for a movie release and is Tom Cruise’s new “biggest domestic box-office debut,” earning $550 million globally in only a week. Somewhere there are admirals celebrating the range of their wingmen.
Still from ‘Babushkas,’ Chicken and Egg Pictures
The Babushkas of Chernobyl is a 2015 documentary produced and directed by Holly Morris and Anne Bogart, which emerged from Morris’ earlier journalism and TED Talk about elderly women living in the shadow of the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear plant.…
‘Becoming Cousteau,’ National Geographic Documentary Films
National Geographic’s Becoming Cousteau (2021), directed and produced by Liz Garbus, is an interesting and timely feature-length biography of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. (The Odyssey, a 2016 film, was a biopic on his life, based on a nonfiction book.) Becoming is not…
Header from the group’s Facebook page
Think of how frantic you would be if you discovered your child had swallowed part of a mushroom they found at the playground. Or what if you caught your cat eating a new houseplant, or your dog ran through a bed of…
Typesetting machines, courtesy Printhusiast, CC 4.0
Some technologies seem to be more aggressive than others in changing their times.
Automatic transmissions, for instance, are ubiquitous but fairly inconsequential; they did not significantly change the experience of driving, and I can still choose to drive a stick if I…
“Sympathy” in narrative usually means something more like “complex interest” than “pity.” The goal is (often but not always) to make characters as human as possible, within constraints of form, so audiences will find them meaningful. This requires treating characters with respect, at least to the point of trying to understand them, even if they are crooks, sadists, torturers, murderers, or Nazis. But if a narrative dramatizes very well, it risks justifying bad people or making us feel we “understand” or “identify with” them. This too is sometimes called “sympathy”—though it is more like empathy—for the devil.
Photo by John Griswold
Yesterday was national Independent Bookstore Day, which the Boston Globe says was first “put on by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association” in 2014. I did not know there was such a promotional event until it was over, but anything that helps preserve…
Screenshot from Dumas’ show, YouTube
Cooking shows are a busman’s holiday for me, given I have always done the cooking in the family. Over the decades one of my recreations has been watching Jacques, Julia, the Two Fat Ladies, Keith Floyd, and others, including Bourdain, who…
Lewis Hine, child coal miners, West Virginia, 1908. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Records of the National Child Labor Committee
One of my grandfather’s first jobs was child coal miner, family lore says. My other grandfather, also born in the 1880s, would have labored on the…
A ghostly smelting plant in ‘Mariupolis,’ distributed by Twenty Twenty Vision films
Mantas Kvedaravicius, a Lithuanian documentary filmmaker, was killed by Russians this week as he tried to leave Mariupol in southern Ukraine. He is best known for the film Mariupolis, which was nominated for prizes…
‘A Sniper’s War’ follows a Serbian national nicknamed Deki, who went to eastern Ukraine in 2014 and served three years as a top sniper with Russian-backed separatist troops. He has killed so many Ukrainians that he cannot keep count and, besides, says he feels nothing about their deaths.
Still from ‘Thy Kingdom Come,’ produced by Beyond the Trees.
Artists can be up to many things, but I have always been drawn to those who bear witness.
“Poetry begins with listening,” says poet Sean Singer.
In this role the artist is a sort of Quan…