We watched a delightful documentary tonight called Pressure Cooker. It’s a film by Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman, and it follows a Philadelphia high school Culinary Arts class as they get ready for a competition for major college scholarships. The kids come from a variety… Read More
We watched Ain’t in it for my Health tonight, the documentary about Levon Helm, directed by Jacob Hatley. It’s a lovely, intimate look at Levon Helm in the midst of his late career resurgence, spawned by two great recordings, Dirt Farmer and Electric Dirt. His… Read More
1961 in Greenwich Village, the Great Folk Music Scare has begun, and Llewyn Davis is making the scene. He’s serious about his folksongs and he’s a bit of a crank, and he’s broke and homeless, sleeping on sofas of whatever friends will take him in.… Read More
We watched the film Songcatcher tonight. It’s a 2001 flick directed by Maggie Greenwald and starring Janet McTeer with cameos by Taj Mahal and Iris Dement. The music is mostly good but still this movie was disappointing. Neither the characters nor the story are very… Read More
This afternoon Tuffy and I and our friend Toni trundled down to the Bell TIFF Lightbox to see a movie called Computer Chess. It’s a film set in the early 80s about a weekend tournament in which computers play one another at chess. It is… Read More
Mud is a coming of age boys adventure story, a tried and true (if possibly tired old) genre. There was plenty of opportunity for this to be a bad movie, but no, no, no, go see this one. Writer/director Jeff Nichols pulls it off. Great… Read More
We ventured out to see Life of Pi tonight. Boy was I surprised when we were handed 3-D glasses. I suggested to Tuffy P that we see this one, but had I known it was in 3-D, I would have chosen a different film. I… Read More
Yesterday was a very unusual day for us in that we watched two films. We saw Skyfall at the cinema, and late last night, we watched The Train on television. The train is a 1965 film directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Burt Lancaster and… Read More
We watched the 1980 John Cassavetes film Gloria tonight on television (TV Ontario). I knew nothing about this one going in except that it starred Gena Rowlands and was written and directed by Cassavetes, who was her husband. It is quite an engaging film, and… Read More
They didn’t eat the steak and eggs. There was a scene in Looper in which the two protagonists, who are the same person but not the same actor (it’s a time travel thing), sit down together at an unlikely diner seemingly in the middle of… Read More
27th Street 