Unlike many moviegoers, I was never that enthusiastic about Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s response to the arms race. I remember that back in the 1980s, a girlfriend and I saw the film and she thought it made light of a serious issue. This was at the height of President Reagan’s sending more missiles to Europe, his Star Wars missile defense plan, and everyone’s lugubrious viewing of The Day After. (more…)
Tag: Steven Clark
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Mildred Walker (1905-1998) wrote a series of books considered Western regional, and was compared to Willa Cather. Walker, however, has a sensibility all her own, and Winter Wheat (1944) was a book that impressed me from the first page. In it, people are tied to the land and the wheat it produces.
It begins in an office by the storage silo in Gotham, a village of 75 that hardly lives up to its pretentious name. (more…)
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Peaches.
The orchard’s ripeness floated through the screen window like a first kiss. They begged to be picked. Gathered. Eaten. Rob fought hard for his orchard, for all his crops. From bugs. Birds. Deer. Rot. (more…)
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February 21, 2022 Steven Clark
Panic in the Streets: Another Covid Movie
Panic in the Streets (1950) is directed by Elia Kazan, and on the surface is a gangster film and often advertised as one. But it’s more of a study of society dealing with an outside threat from a contagious disease.
Set in a wintery New Orleans, a card game in a dive breaks up when one of the players, an illegal immigrant, gets sick and has to leave. (more…)
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NOTE: All names in this memoir are fictional.
Last year I went to a Christmas party in St. Louis, given by a communications group: a catch-all for filmmakers, directors, actors, screenwriters, and the usual wannabes. Having written an award-winning screenplay some years ago, I’m more be than wanna, but the candle of my fifteen minutes of local fame has long since burned out. (more…)
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The vision of fifties America as a sunny, prosperous world full of stable values and families has no truck with Billy Wilder. Having spent some time in the Weimar Berlin of his youth as a paid dancer for women, he got used to being used and rented out, if anyone can ever get used to it. He packed his cynicism with him when he came to America and easily fit into Hollywood. To Wilder, everyone has a price, and their most noble values and visions are up for grabs. (more…)
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John Podhoretz
Hell of a Ride: Backstage at the White House Follies, 1989-1993
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993Hell of a Ride is a witty, funny, insider view of a White House whose chief occupant was confused about “the vision thing.” Whose speeches and actions were contradictory and tepid. A Yale graduate who far too many times sounded inarticulate, once saying, in a moment predating Bidenesque boo-boos, “Message: I care” — speaking not from the heart, but from his teleprompter. (more…)
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The sky was gray and scuffed, like someone had wiped their feet on it.
It had stayed that way since the dogs came and took Rinty. Mom always said she could do her chores without watching me because Rinty never left my side. (more…)
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On Christmas of 1996 I was at a crossroads. I had spent seven years in Boston — a life’s goal, and they were seven of the happiest years of my life — but in 1991 I moved to Columbia, Missouri, to live with Mother. I had worked and saved money, ostensibly planning to go to library school at the university, then return to Boston, ready to get hired. But things didn’t turn out that way. (more…)
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Bread and Chocolate, a 1974 Italian film written and directed by Franco Brusati and starring Nino Manfredi, came when immigration was heating up in America. It reminded me of my own experience of the 1970s, when I was stationed in Germany and seeing foreign “guest workers” doing scut work everywhere, from restaurant help to loading trucks. In front of my barracks every morning, a doleful squad of Turks hopped off a truck to collect good, clean, municipal German trash while a burly German in a truck waited for them to do the drag and hassle before driving on. (more…)
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Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
Burn the land, boil the sea
You cannot take the sky from meSo went the opening theme of Firefly, a boot camp/cowboy song with fiddles and guitars instead of electronic music. In 2002, Firefly was a sci-fi show that led a brief but exciting life, not even completing a full season. (more…)
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Virginia Woolf said that a writer needed two essential things: guineas and locks –that is, money and privacy. June Leigh (Naomi Watts), the protagonist of The Wolf Hour, has enough of these, and like Garbo, she wants to be alone. However, her door buzzer keeps ringing and no one answers on the other end. It’s almost a Greek chorus of defiance, a spiritual raspberry to June’s pretensions, for she is the author of The Patriarch, a searing novel that established her career as a writer and has caused a split with her family so bad that they’ve disowned her. (more…)
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Dr. Sidney Schafer (James Coburn) is a therapist at the top of his game. He’s clever, probing, a master of his profession, and James Coburn gives his character a smirk of pride while his eyes probe his patients in this 1967 satire. His office is very sixties, abounding in modern art and decor, and set on a table is a Chinese gong. Why a gong? Memories of foreign travel? A way to summon the Emperor or expel demons? Schafer is, after all, an emperor of therapy. (more…)