One of my favorite freelance gigs is giving talks to local cinema clubs. The groups mostly are comprised of people over 60, which is my preferred demographic of human beings. As Louis CK once said, “Even the dumbest seventy-year-old is going to have seen more than the smartest twenty-year-old.” The following is a lecture I gave to a Long Island club about “The Meddler,” which we all enjoyed. Some in the audience were all too acquainted with the loneliness of widowhood and retirement, and shared beautiful insights when I finished talking. More than one person made me cry. Sometimes talking about movies is even better than seeing them, which is why I am grateful for my work even when suffering an indignity like “Captain America.”
I have a funny story about seeing “The Meddler.” I was scheduled to see it the day Susan Sarandon, who stars as Marnie, the titular meddler, was all over the news for her controversial comments to Chris Hayes about why Trump might be better for America than Hillary Clinton. Her comments confirmed my long-abiding feeling that movie stars should be seen and not heard unless they are speaking from a script, and I tweeted something to that effect. Continue Reading →
J.G. Ballard, whose 1975 British novel High-Rise has been adapted into a film opening this month in the United States, could be described as one of the preeminent twentieth-century writers of “weird fiction” – a term spawned by H. P. Lovecraft to describe his own work and the work of other writers he liked. They are tales, as 
Thelonious Monk once said, “Talking about jazz is like dancing about architecture.” Having dated a jazz trombonist, I know this to be true, but I hadn’t considered until recently that making a movie about jazz might be an equally quixotic process. Free-form if not formless and often wordless, the musical genre asks us to abandon our need for structure and surrender to a purer state. Such trust in audiences is not exactly bottom-line Hollywood’s forte, yet “Miles Ahead,” the new film about Miles Davis, has the remarkable audacity to take all its cues directly from jazz.