This week I got to speak about Ira Sach’s wonderful new film “Little Men,” a micro-indie (that doesn’t look like a micro-indie) focusing on the friendship blooming between two thirteen-year-old boys as their parents battle over a Brooklyn retail space. I gave the lecture to the wonderful Long Island cinema club where I sometimes speak and from whom I always learn a lot whenever I do. The group is comprised of cinephiles who are mostly retired and emigrants from Brooklyn themselves. Their perspectives about the entwinement of art and life and how time can change seemingly cut-and-dry issues have made me cry more than once. Suffice it to say, they really grasped this film. Here is the bulk of what I discussed. Continue Reading →
Archive | Age Matters
‘The Little Prince’ Finally Lands
In terms of its impact on cinema, The Little Prince may well have been named The Little Engine That Could. From “The Aviator” to “The Lego Movie” and “The English Patient,” this children’s book about the interplanetary travels of a solitary boy on a solitary asteroid has been influencing films since its release in 1943 – the year before its author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, disappeared in a fighter plane. Inspired by his crash in the Sahara Desert during an international flight race, the story was always tinged with melancholy about the collateral damage of growing up.
But the writer and aviator may not have anticipated how this collateral damage could extend to the adaptation of his book, which has been butchered in such far-ranging forms as an anime series and a 1974 Hollywood musical. (To be fair, that latter project is at least a fascinating disaster, listing no less than Bob Fosse in its credits.) While a new, computer stop-motion animation adaptation by Mark Osborne (“Kung Fu Panda”) is actually good, even its trajectory has been fraught. Premiering at the 2015 Cannes Festival, it was delayed for U.S. release and dropped by a distributor before finally landing in the happy home of Netflix Studios, which is releasing it on a streaming platform as well as in theaters this month. Something about the purity of this story – of the prince’s clear little voice and features – has seemed to confound Hollywood, which, though itself founded on no shortage of childlike imagination, has a hard time embracing simplicity, let alone sidestepping bombast. But Osbourne and his team have devised a take that’s quite ingenious. Continue Reading →
New Sea Rising
Yesterday was all about the moon.
I woke at 3:40 am, which is when my highest self tugs me out of slumber when it has no other way of making contact. Lately, I’ve been waking at that time a lot. Seismic changes are afoot and because I keep my head down during the day, my guides have no other time to download information. No longer night, not yet day: 3:40 is soul time.
When I woke, I was awash in menstrual blood. It wasn’t an enormous surprise—my period was three days late—but nonetheless I felt a cold shock. Waking on fresh white sheets pooled with your blood will do that to you, I don’t care how many years you’ve been getting your period.
I should say at this point that menstruation is on the shortlist of topics that I—and most people—never discuss on page. Also on that list: shitting habits (which is too bad; the Crapicorn in me absolutely adores discussing shit) and the quality of sex with your partner. (People disclose quantity but never quality, which is a land from which you cannot return.) But it is a new moon, and mentioning the unmentionable is necessary in order to achieve my month’s goals. Continue Reading →