I gave my two daughters and my niece a pen and a pad as we entered the movie theater to see Monkey Kingdom, Disneynature’s latest documentary. “I need help writing my review,” I said.  The underdog story of Maya drives the film, and she is perhaps the strongest female protagonist in a Disney film in recent memory. When we exited the theater, I received back two whole sentences, the most complete being, “This was a really good movie,” from my 9-year-old niece, who also noticed that there were “a few parts of monkeys fighting.” In retrospect, it was an unfair […]

Noah Baumbach’s new film, While We’re Young, is his most mature (no pun intended) and funny film to date. Each of his films (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg and Frances Ha) combine funny dialogue with the painful drama of relationships. Serious subjects, but the director handles them with such a light touch that we find ourselves laughing at these characters before we realize how much we may resemble them. While We’re Young opens with a middle-age couple, Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts), watching over their friends’ baby, trying to calm it by telling […]

The Divergent series began with last year’s Divergent, a film based on the first novel of a poorly written dystopian trilogy aimed at teenagers and young adults. The series was made to cash in on the phenomenal box office success of The Hunger Games. Both series are made by Lionsgate, a major non-Hollywood studio, which gives them a distinct non-Hollywood flavor, though obviously does not guarantee the avoidance of typical Hollywood flaws. Insurgent also suggests that nonconformity and challenging the status quo are positive attributes and should be encouraged among the young. The Divergent series is set in a future version […]

I have been experimenting with a new photography printing project in which I transfer layer after layer of photographic inks printed on plastic to the same piece of wood, building a transparent depth that I hope the viewer will gaze into and discover new things along the way. I describe this method to my students as doing Photoshop without a computer. That of course is not fully true. I still shoot with a digital camera, use Photoshop or Lightroom to process the image, use a computer to run the printer that puts thousands of droplets of inks onto plastic—but I no longer […]

When I see commercials with aloof dads, I don’t think much of them. The mom talks to the camera, the kids eat and play, and the dads act clueless (uh, honey, where do we keep the cheese?). I’ve heard the arguments that these commercials make dads look like idiots, and I buy that, but after years of watching mothers mis-portrayed in commercials, I’m not going to pretend that we dads are major victims. When I watch these commercials, I know I am not going to buy whatever they are selling anyway. So I just hit the mute button, check email, […]

When I was a kid, we only owned two movies: Disney’s Bambi and Cinderella. And since Bambi’s mom [SPOILER ALERT] gets shot by a hunter and dies, I’m sure we never watched it more than three times. Our VHS copy of Cinderella, however, we wore to shreds. To this day, my mom can quote several scenes in that movie verbatim—and she’s not a movie quote person. Thus, when I learned Disney had made a live-action version, my inner 6-year-old did pirouettes of glee. The film also presents an interesting vision of racial equality, where races as we know them live […]

Just to see how much alcohol the characters in the film consume is enough to make you cry, and that is only one of many sad things about life in modern Russia.

This is the first all-banjo album to be added to my collection, and a marvelous addition it is.

Watching Moore forget a dinner date in her early stages, making a video for her future self to find one day, or struggling to locate the bathroom in her vacation home, we see how the disease plays out.

No matter how crisp the writing or engaging the characters, the nauseating array of severed limbs and broken necks drain the movie of all the joy it works so hard to supply.