Cinemadope
Cinemadope: Alone Together
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m starting to miss the world. Out of work and holed up in the house — half the week in a kind of monkish solitude, the other half with three increasingly stir-crazy kids — is exactly the opposite of what anyone wants out of...
Cinemadope: Home Theater
It might seem silly to have a local film column this week. As I write, public schools are shutting down for a three-week hiatus, restaurants are shifting strictly to takeout service, and we’re all avoiding crowds. The long-running Pioneer Valley Jewish Film Festival...
Cinemadope: Dog Days
“All it takes is one bad day,” a famous cartoon villain once said, “to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy.” And while Kelly Reichardt’s 2008 film Wendy and Lucy is about as far as one can get from the world of the Dark Knight, it takes that “one bad day” idea and...
Cinemadope: Toon in — animation for the late-night crowd
In the run-up to the Oscars a few weeks ago, you might have seen a flurry of activity from local theaters as they featured the yearly roundup of animated short films that were vying for the golden statuette. It’s always a treat to see that collection of film on the...
Cinemadope: Screen Time
I still remember that day, bright with promise, just after the new year had dawned, when my children finally had to go to school again. Don’t get me wrong, I love the little scamps more than I’ve ever loved anything on this earth, but two weeks of holidays, sugar, and...
Cinemadope: Torch Song
Waiting is hard. Some of us skip ahead in our books, others sneak a peek at a bride before the ceremony. Some of us roar past a minivan going a perfectly reasonable 70 mph on 91 South — I’m looking at you, white Honda Civic. There’s just something about getting an...
Cinemadope: The Short List
Ever since I was first introduced to the tiny hot dog, I have been an appetizer man. Those delectable little morsels — a bite or two at most — can contain a density of flavor that many full meals can only wish to attain. And while many are served ahead of an...
Cinemadope: Guy Ritchie returns to crime with The Gentlemen
There was a time, once, when British director Guy Ritchie was considered the across-the-pond reflection of Quentin Tarantino. The filmmaker who, four years after Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and six after Reservoir Dogs, started pumping out stylish if patchy tales...
Cinemadope: Child’s Work
Ask most Americans when slavery ended, and you’ll likely hear something about the Civil War and Abe Lincoln. Ask them about the rest of the world, and you may be met by a blank stare. But the truth is that it continues on in our modern era, and that many of us,...
Cinemadope: A Developing Story — the invention of a camera for the masses
Like most everyone with kids these days, I tried my best to capture a bit of the holiday magic this season. Photos, videos, the occasional audio recording — moments to share with far flung family who wouldn’t get to see Christmas morning, and memories to share with my...
Cinemadope: Holding a Grudge — Horror remakes, remade
Fans of the horror genre, and specifically the subset of films that have come out of Asia, will recall the mid-2000s as a heady time. With the success of the 2002 Gore Verbinski film The Ring — a remake of the 1998 Japanese film Ring, in which watching a cursed...
Cinemadope: Adam Sandler gets serious
Back in the Blockbuster era of movie consumption it was hard not to think of movies in terms of genre first: walk into one of those big box shrines to moviemaking and you couldn’t take a step without first charting a course by the signs hanging from the ceiling....
Cinemadope: Holly Daze
You may or may not have heard, but this thing called Christmas is happening on Wednesday. Turns out it’s kind of a big deal, and while a lot of the movie-going crowd will be busy elsewhere on the 25th, local cinemas are getting in the spirit in the days leading up to...
Cinemadope: The Age of Activism
When well-known activist Frances Crowe died this August at her home in Northampton, the loss rippled through the town in a way few passings do. One hundred years old at the time of her death, Crowe had touched generations of Valley residents — changing some minds,...
Cinemadope: ‘I’m Leaving Now’ playing at Amherst Cinema
If you talked much politics over the Thanksgiving table this year, you probably noticed that very few of those involved knew what they were talking about. Which is to say that most of us, however passionate we might be about a particular issue, often lack a true...
Cinemadope: A Garden Party – Franklin County gets busy
If you’re out and about in Franklin County this weekend, you might want to make some room in your Saturday calendar. In an area that is often on the quiet side for film events, this weekend is shaping up to be a busy one for film lovers in the northern half of the...
Cinemadope: Hit Parade
The mob movie is the shadowy reflection of the American Dream. Stories of success despite humble beginnings, of hardscrabble times and strong work ethics, of family bonds and the desire for a better life — all the usual tropes apply. What makes it work so well in the...
Cinemadope: The Twilight Zone turns 60
The Twilight Zone was always a show that got better after it ended. At its best, the science fiction/fantasy/horror of the series did its strongest work in the minds of viewers left dumbstruck by a twist ending or unexpected detail that upended everything that had...
Cinemadope: When sequels outshine the original
The sequel is a strange and fickle beast. For people on both sides of the box office, there is a great desire to see them do well; those studio bigwigs in their top hats and monocles love the allure of a built-in audience, and all the dollars they carry; we mere...
Cinemadope: Trick and Treat – The strange horrors of House
As this issue of the Advocate hits the streets, October will just be starting to fold up its skeletons and plastic spiders to make way for the inflatable Santas. (Thanksgiving fan? Sorry, enjoy your single Thursday afternoon.) For many horror fans, it’s the end of...
Cinemadope: Making the Scene
People in the Valley are a creative bunch. At my day job, one woman I work with is a talented seamstress who creates wonderful clothes and stuffed toys; another works with local potters to decorate clay vessels and cups. My old Advocate editor — a published poet —...
Cinemadope: The Chambermaid at the Academy of Music
When I first moved to Northampton a couple of decades ago, my partner at the time took a job as a chambermaid at a local hotel. I can’t recall now exactly how long it lasted, but I know it wasn’t long — the hours, the amount of labor involved, the indifference (or...
Cinemadope: A Landmark Film on AIDS Gets a Second Chance
There are so many stories that never get the audience they deserve. Whether overshadowed by events of their era or lost to the circumstances of their creators lives, there will always be those narratives that — if they are ever recorded at all — deserve a better fate....
Cinemadope: Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Where is the Friend’s House?’ comes to Amherst Cinema
One of the most magical things about great storytelling is the ability of the storyteller to transform a seemingly simple thing into a grand or heart-pounding adventure. A guy chases a whale (or a shark chases some people). Two teenagers fall in love, but their...
Cinemadope: Control/Shift
My two oldest children started kindergarten a few weeks back. New school, new friends (one hopes), new experiences. It’s been an adjustment — maybe more for me than for them, I sometimes think — and it has had me thinking a lot of how much has changed in the 40 years...
Cinemadope: Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live at the Academy of Music
One of the great pleasures of movie-going, in my experience, is going alone. Even when surrounded by strangers in the dark, there is something wonderfully personal about being blanketed by the sound and image of a big screen projection; a show just for you, where you...
Cinemadope: Inside Man
It is sometimes difficult to believe that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — ICE — is only 16 years old. Created in 2003 under George W. Bush in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks, the new agency merged the two previously separate...
Cinemadope: Remembering Toni Morrison
When the writer Toni Morrison passed away in early August, she left behind worlds. Her own, certainly, brought so vividly to life in works like The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved — carefully crafted and filled with a vitality that carried a sometimes brutal truth about...
Cinemadope: Ready or Not a cunning twist on The Most Dangerous Game
I could hardly have imagined, back when I was a gangly middle schooler, how far into my adulthood one of my favorite stories would reach. But here it is some three-plus decades later, and it seems that every year there is some new tale that bears the influence of...
Cinemadope: Keeping Time — Our lives in music
As I was getting ready to write this column, the news came over the radio that filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker had died. Never really a household name, Pennebaker nevertheless contributed to our shared cultural vocabulary in ways that nearly anyone will recognize: if you...
Cinemadope: Those Meddling Kids — Stories of pint-sized heroes
Like so many others, I spent a short but richly rewarding stretch of my July binge-watching the third season of the Netflix series Stranger Things. If you don’t know it — and to my surprise, I found at least a couple of people this month who still hadn’t heard of Matt...
Cinemadope: Musical journeys small and large
All of us have those sounds that touch some deep part of our souls, triggering memories and emotions that might otherwise lay dormant. Like scents tied to childhood — the smell of a censer for lapsed Catholics, or the perfume of a grandmother gone too soon — sounds...
Cinemadope: The gift of gifts
It can be interesting to track how new editions of popular books change with the times. Even the titles, sometimes, can reflect the state of the era. When Lewis Hyde’s now-classic book The Gift was first published in 1983, it carried the wonderfully evocative subtitle...
Cinemadope: Reel to Wheel
Everyone has their own idea of what really makes it summer in New England. For some, it’s getting that first soft serve, melting in the after-dinner sun. Another might mark it with the first visit to a favorite swimming hole, when the water is still just a little too...
Cinemadope: Visionaries
We often consider our visual artists in terms of their medium — a watercolorist, a sculptor, a portrait painter. But whatever their chosen tools, almost all artists share one thing that is so fundamental that we often overlook it: the gift of vision. And here I’m not...
Cinemadope: Show and tell — films and filmmaking
Since its inception in 2007, the Ashfield Film Festival has become an annual gathering point for film lovers of the Valley. With an emphasis on local filmmaking, the fall festival — co-founded by Ashfield Cultural Council chair Tamsen Merrill and film editor Harry...
Gundermann at Amherst Cinema highlights Germany’s Springsteen
The trope of the working-class-hero has long had a place in American music, but particularly so since Bruce Springsteen’s career began to take off in the mid-1970s. Things only got more blue around the collar when his megahit album, “Born in the U.S.A.,” was released...
Cinemadope: Lost and Found
Living in the age of Instagram has meant — for better or for worse — that everyone is a photographer, or thinks they are. Which in the end has been a great win, I think, and one that has opened the door to creativity for an untold number of people who otherwise might...
Cinemadope: Combat Obscura, a marine’s film, offers a peek behind the curtain of war
It shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone that the military mights of the world have long been concerned with what we’ve come to call “optics” — the way in which a given political action is perceived by a public that is surrounded on all sides by an endless media...
Cinemadope: Neither Wolf Nor Dog at the Bing
The Bing Arts Center building, down on Sumner Avenue in Springfield’s Forest Park neighborhood, has had its share of ups and downs over the years. It started life as Kossaboom’s Service Station a century ago, and filled tanks for a few decades before a reconfiguration...
Cinemadope: The Real Story of Nureyev
It was a scene straight out of a paranoid thriller: 1961, a Paris airport, the KGB circling ever closer around a famous Russian, bent on closing the net around their prey. A waiting plane destined for Moscow. At the last moment, a dash for freedom — with the help of...
Cinemadope: Summer season means outdoor movies
All of us have our seasonal touchstones. As New Englanders, especially, we seem to have a compulsion to carve up our years (maple season, mud season, mosquito season) and mark the moment that one quarter melts into another. For many, the spring-to-summer transition...
Cinemadope: Northampton Rafiki screening shows LGBTQ pride at home and abroad
Pride Day celebrations were just winding down in Northampton as I sat down to get to work on this column. Now in its 38th year, the event is still a powerful reminder of both the power of community and the necessity of equality and representation. But while the parade...
Cinemadope: Love, Gilda: Gilda Radner, in her own words
When Gilda Radner was in her heyday as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, I was still too young to know her hilarity first-hand; SNL was past my bedtime. But when she passed away in May of 1989, I was in high school. That was a Saturday, and I can still recall the...
Cinemadope: The human penchant for horror
Much has been written, by better minds than mine, about the human penchant for horror. That impulse to indulge in our most deeply seated human fears and frailties is behind both traffic jams at accident scenes and modern gods-and-monsters tales about the undead (or...
Cinemadope: A Woman’s World
There were always a lot of women in my family. When I think back to my childhood, to family cookouts and graduations, to birthdays and funerals, it is always the aunts and grandmothers that rule my remembered roosts. They made sure everyone was fed, slipped the...
Cinemadope: The Biggest Little Farm at Amherst Cinema
Spring in the Pioneer Valley always brings with it the sweet reminder of how lucky we are to be surrounded by so many working farms. Drive down just about any road that leads into or out of one of our bigger towns, and you’re sure to coast by a few coolers with “Fresh...
Cinemadope: Is Hellboy actually a Western?
The tropes of the American Western have had a surprisingly wide influence. Its heady mix of self-sufficiency and violence, often presented as a necessary but natural manifestation of a hero’s morality, has spread like seeping blood into nearly every kind of popular...
Cinemadope: Dear Genre
Genre films are a bit like the snack food of the cinematic universe. Something of a guilty pleasure, often consumed late at night, and each with its own diehard fans. These are the films that almost never seek to be all things to all people, but instead deliver an...
Cinemadope: Rite of Spring – the 14th year of the Pioneer Valley Jewish Film Festival
With every March in the Valley comes a feeling of renewal — the Spring Bulb Show at Smith, that exquisite extra hour of daylight, a breeze that doesn’t slice through your very soul. And with that new sense of life comes the urge to get out and about, to emerge from...
Cinemadope: The cinema scene of Franklin County
Despite its proximity to the more famous haunts of Northampton, Franklin County has always had its own lively arts scene. The Green River Festival, celebrating 33 years in 2019, is perhaps the most recognizable name, but other area venues like the Montague Bookmill,...
Cinemadope: Russian Icons
For many modern filmmakers, the shadow of Ingmar Bergman looms large. The great Swede, whose name has become a kind of shorthand here for foreign art-house film, was a revelatory experience for young filmmakers coming of age in a pre-digital era; seeing what he could...
Cinemadope: CatVideoFest at Amherst Cinema
If you’ve been around the interwebs for a bit, you’ve almost certainly run across Henri. Henri — or, to use his full title, Henri, le Chat Noir — is an ennui-soaked cat whose subtitled French musings call to mind old arthouse imports. “If my tail wags, it is a reflex...
Cinemadope: Off the Wall
Art lovers in the Valley are never far from a good gallery. Between the extensive collections of local colleges, dedicated museums, and the smaller neighborhood salons that pepper our local downtowns, we are lucky to live in an area with such a vibrant artistic...
Cinemadope: Natural Causes: The strange beauties of Rosamond Purcell
The photography of Rosamond Purcell is work that often feels plucked from another period. Her artistic impulse — what filmmaker Errol Morris described as “the contemplation of things that other people would normally just ignore” — harkens back to a time when many...
Cinemadope: Movies for winter vacation
Listen, I love my kids. I do. But it’s been a long winter around here. The holiday season was a terrible round-robin of stomach bugs, the heat went on the fritz in their bedroom, and a cold snap kept us cooped up in the house on days when their energy level could have...
Cinemadope: Fish Out of Water – Two animated classics from Japan
Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki has always kept a close tether to the world around him. In wonderfully thoughtful films like My Neighbor Totoro and Pom Poko, beloved by young and old (and crowds and critics) alike, he has eagerly yet tenderly explored our human...
Cinemadope: Superhero overload
In the last decade, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has cast a long shadow over the rest of the filmmaking world. Beginning with the surprisingly wide-reaching hit that was 2008’s Iron Man, the series of interconnected films — now up to twenty titles and about as...
Cinemadope: Star Gazing – A Celebrity Tells Her Tale
Some years back, one of my many day jobs had me working a small newsstand. Mostly, it meant selling local papers and coffee, and, once a month or so, packing up all the glossier magazines that hadn’t sold during the previous weeks. Those days were like spending hours...
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