Cinemadope
Cinemadope: Prince’s Purple Reign
We all have a tendency, as we get on in years, to remember our better days and let the not-so-great times wash away in the river of time. It’s human, and while you might roll your eyes at your great-aunt launching into that same story about sneaking into a Beatles...
Cinemadope: Defiant Requiem showing in Amherst
Notes on WarWhen it comes to war and film, there will never be a shortage of stories. Whether tales of daring or death, on the front or at home, war can bring out the best and worst in us, and create lifelong strength — or leave one with lasting wounds. And while we...
Cinemadope: Here and Gone
Small films shown quickly, so see them today Showing movies is a tough racket, and the hard truth of the matter is that an opening weekend can make or break a film’s chances at breaking even at the box office. Do decently out of the gate, and you might get a chance at...
Cinemadope: Swede Hearts, a celebration of the best Bergmans in film: Ingmar and Ingrid
Hear that a local theater is hosting a Bergman festival, and the first thought that will pop into the heads of most art-house denizens will be that of the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. An icon for the ages, the director’s films — The Seventh Seal, Fanny and...
Cinemadope: ‘April and the Extraordinary World’ plays this weekend; Longevity serum, missing scientists, and a talking cat named Darwin
Ask people what they like in art, and you might think that all they want is “the real world” mirrored back at them. We hail the Old Masters — their mastery of light and shadow, their ability to make hard marble seem like supple skin. But where would we story lovers be...
Cinemadope: Toot Your Own Horn
It must have been in 1989 or so that I first saw Colors, director Dennis Hopper’s story about police and gang violence in Los Angeles. Set mostly in South Central and East L.A., it starred Sean Penn and Robert Duvall as partnered cops — a rookie and his mentor —...
Cinemadope: Everybody Wants Some!!
Any director worth their salt knows their strengths. Scorsese has New York and the mob; Allen has New York and neurosis; Tarantino has pop culture and cursing; Bergman had Sweden, bleakness, and death. To me, one of the marks of an interesting director — an...
Cinemadope: Let’s Fight – The conflicts of good stories
I’m sure that any first-year film major could tell you more than I can about what makes films tick, but for me, the best of them have always come down to the story of relationships — much like our own lives. Whether it’s He Said/She Said, Axis against Allies, or Harry...
Cinemadope: Have Faith – The Pioneer Valley Jewish Film Festival Returns
Religion and art have a complicated history. Together they’ve been responsible for some of the great masterworks of history — the Sistine Chapel, Chagall’s stained glass, the Dome of the Rock — but they’ve also produced their fair share of eye-poppingly...
Cinemadope: Piano Man, Marvin Hamlisch’s musical legacy
You don’t have to be a music nerd to know Marvin Hamlisch. Or a theater nerd. Or a film nerd. Or a television nerd. Because even if you don’t know him by name, Hamlisch’s work will have seeped into the soul of anyone who was alive in the latter half of the 20th...
Cinemadope: A Bird in Hand, Sesame Street comes to Northampton
As I sit here in my shirtsleeves, typing away near a slightly open window, I really must insist that readers of this column remember this minor detail: it is February. This is the time when we’re all supposed to be calling all the hardware stores, asking about roof...
Cinemadope: Turkish delight, the unstoppable spirit of youth
Twice in the 1990s, a striking debut made a splash in creative circles. There were, of course, other debuts that have left their marks — Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, for instance, hit screens in 1992, cutting the channel for the coming river of pop...
Cinemadope: Shifting Gears, bikes, cars, and the future
Here in the Pioneer Valley, bikes and biking are part of the fabric of daily life. People come from miles away to roll along the long bike path. Built on an old rail line that stretches across the Connecticut river and connects far-flung towns, the bike path has grown...
Cinemadope: Nerd Christmas
When I do the dishes in our house, I often like to plug in some headphones and catch up on a favorite podcast. One of those podcasts is a new discovery for me, so I’ve been catching up on old episodes during my nightly scrubbing. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter...
Winter is Coming: Holiday Film Traditions
As I sit down to write this column, the calendar is teetering on the edge of December. Thanksgiving may have been unseasonably balmy, but today was the first day all season that I left the house and immediately turned back to put on another layer. When I got back, I...
Cinemadope: Jennifer Lawrence, then and now
It’s hard to imagine, sometimes, that Jennifer Lawrence’s first listed credit on IMDb — “Mascot” on a 2006 episode of the TV series Monk, by the way — is less than 10 years old. The Kentucky-born actress, still just 25 today, has had a meteoric rise, with her mix of...
Cinemadope: Bond Issue, Daniel Craig makes an old role his own
There was a moment in Apple’s September product announcement event — during which they unveiled the newest version of the Apple TV, their set-top streaming device that brings Netflix, Hulu, HBO and much more to the living room TV set — when designer Jen Folse took a...
Cinemadope: The Social Network, Cuban music and a couple of classics
When I first moved to Northampton in 1997, the now classic Buena Vista Social Club had only recently been released. A collection of Cuban music performed by veterans of the Havana scene, it was a surprise hit that was originally meant to be a showcase for a...
Cinemadope: Return Tickets, a mainstay reopens in Amherst
When a movie theater closes up shop, it often catches us by surprise. It isn’t that we don’t see it coming; we all know by now about Netflix, Hulu, and Redbox, and how the ever-expanding options of cable television and the Internet have siphoned off some of the...
Cinemadope: Autumn film trips in the Valley
Movie fans can be a pasty bunch. Ducking out of the sun to catch a sparsely attended matinee is par for the course — those nearly empty mid-week shows are a welcome respite from the cellphones and chatter of weekend opening nights. Netflix, Vimeo, and the local...
Cinemadope: Busting out. A comedy classic returns.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the upcoming reboot to the Ghostbusters franchise. Director Paul Feig’s (Bridesmaids) 2016 release is a female-centered take on the story that stars Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy as a pair of old friends who are thrown...
Cinemadope: Scare Tactics, Halloween movies
Of all the holiday movie traditions, it might be that of Halloween that has given us in the film world the most joy over the years. Christmas has some winners, of course, but is often bogged down by moralizing, sappiness, or commercialism. Thanksgiving and New Year’s...
Cinemadope: Smuggling a pile of Tibet to exiles in India
I’ve lived in the Valley for some 18 years now, which is exactly as long as I lived under my parents’ roof. Everything in between there and here — my two homes, each of which, now, has had its own family life — has been a way station, a stop along a longer road. But...
Cinemadope: Octoberfest, a new film festival hits Northampton
We here in the Pioneer Valley love a good festival. Just this year I’ve seen festivals devoted to asparagus, tomatoes, garlic, or one that just throws it all together to celebrate the harvest season. Our small towns have festivals to celebrate their small-towniness,...
Cinemadope: Hurts So Good, remembering the ’80s
As much as I love good film — the transformative power of a story well told, the otherworldly experience of settling into the dark as the lights come up on someone else’s dream — there is something to be said for the bad ones out there. To be clear, I’m not talking...
Cinemadope: Beyond the Screen, special shows and a new job for De Niro
One of the great treats of having Amherst Cinema around for so long — it turns 10 next year — is that the programming has had the chance to grow beyond the standard fare that is all too expected of an “art house” theater (a label, I’d guess, the theater itself would...
Cinemadope: Mob Mentality, the Whitey Bulger story
Almost from the get go, movies and crime have been a natural pair. Perhaps it’s the voyeuristic nature of the medium, where to some degree we’re all just looking through a one-way mirror, that draws us to stories of sin and violence — we get all the adrenaline with...
Cinemadope: Soul Music, The Beatles in Amherst and an Indian classic
Film fans might remember Julie Taymor’s wide-ranging 2007 movie Across the Universe. It opened to mixed reviews, but one thing it had going for it was the strength of its musical foundation: the bulk of the soundtrack — and indeed the whole arc of the film’s story —...
Cinemadope: Counter Culture, a New York deli thriving in Texas
When I first moved to the Valley in the late ’90s, it was from Brooklyn, where I had spent a few post-college years in a vain attempt at being worldly. I had gone there imagining I would dash off a book and get discovered (not necessarily in that order) and that the...
Cinemadope: Drawing it out, cartoons from other shores
When we talk about animated films here in the States, the conversation often gets stuck in the worlds of Disney and Pixar. Those powerhouse studios and their imitators have largely defined the big-screen cartoon for American crowds, and while their successes have...
Cinemadope: Reel Change, film with a political background
Valley residents have never shied away from political activism. Issues of equality, discrimination, and civil liberty — and the many protests, marches, and rallies that often come with those issues — have always found a wealth of open hearts and open ears here. But...
Cinemadope: Classic Fords
In a few short months — smack in the middle of the holiday season, as it happens — we’ll get the gift of a new Star Wars movie. The hope is that director J.J. Abrams can give the franchise the kick in the pants that it so desperately needs after the disaster of the...
Cinemadope: Fantastic Journey, a franchise rebooted, and a local film
It was just a few weeks ago that this column looked at the resurrection of the superhero movie, something I largely attributed to the success of the Iron Man franchise — its billions in box office provided a sort of force field that allowed other, lesser-known,...
Cinemadope: Summer Camp, the power of blockbusters
As the summer swelters on — as I write this, it is a muggy 78 degrees long after sundown — my thoughts turn to blockbusters. It’s surely no coincidence that the biggest and loudest of our high-gloss spectacles are pushed out during the height of summer. Their promise...
Cinemadope: Foreign Affair, films from abroad that feel familiar
It’s long been a cliché that film buffs love foreign film. As a stereotype, it’s up there with the Frenchman’s baguette or a private detective’s desk-drawer bottle of scotch. (I defy anyone to show me a scene where a hard-boiled P.I. pulls anything else out of that...
Cinemadope: Ant-Man joins the growing cast of super(human) stars
Way, way back in 2008, a little film was making the rounds, sneaking into the global subconscious in a way no film of its kind had done to date. It went on to gross billions in box office over the course of a multi-film run, but its more lasting legacy is measured...
Cinemadope: Waste Not, Want Not, Hollywood’s recycling program
Remakes, reboots, and reinventions have a long history in the world of Hollywood. It’s one of those things, like dubbed foreign films, that film lovers love to complain about. But the truth is probably a bit more complicated than we like to think. To be sure, there...
Cinemadope: English Channels, the life and death of Amy Winehouse
Director Asif Kapadia’s 2010 documentary Senna managed to do what many might have considered impossible: it got the art-house crowd interested in the life of a race car driver. Ayrton Senna, the Brazilian driver at the heart of the story, lived to push the envelope —...
Cinemadope: Then and now, a look at how we used to watch movies
It can be hard to remember, in these days of shared links and 900-channel cable subscriptions, just how big a role the movie theater used to play in the American cultural landscape. It was especially so during Hollywood’s Golden Age, when television was still in its...
Cinemadope: Cello and Goodbye, a portrait of Arthur Russell
If you go online to track down recordings of musician Arthur Russell, you’ll quickly realize that the late composer is a divisive figure. An avant-garde artist whose cello-and-voice works still seem like something from the near future (despite the fact that their...
Cinemadope: A Moving Picture, a film aims to help Nepal
It’s been almost two months since a devastating earthquake struck Nepal, and while the story of that terrible event — thousands dead, many more injured and homeless, and continuing damage done by some strong aftershocks — has slowly faded from the day-to-day...
Cinemadope: ‘Love & Mercy’
We Americans have always seemed, to me, to be a nostalgic people. Maybe my thinking has something to do with the long line of Irish storytellers in my family — even today, the smallest of family events rarely passes without reference to the outlandish history of some...
Cinemadope: Keys to Success, a piano prodigy takes lessons
Jazz and film have a great history together. In the early days, jazz was a boon to the young film industry, providing a seemingly endless collection of tunes for hit musicals. Indeed, in those days a great soundtrack was not merely something to sing; in many cases the...
Cinemadope: Screen Time, breakfast with Curtis
Nobody in their right mind would suggest that making a movie is easy. There are so many levels to moviemaking — the writing, the casting, the shooting and editing and sound and music and so on — that it’s a wonder any of them ever come off decently, never mind...
Cinemadope: Outside Chance, screenings under the summer stars
Even as they fade from our landscape, there is something quintessentially American about drive-in theaters. They seem, somehow, to contain all the great stages of our lives in one place; in one car, the reckless romance of youth; in another — probably a station wagon...
Cinemadope: He Shoots, He Scores!
So often when we talk about film, we talk about the people on either side of the camera. We talk about the great actors and actresses whose performances touch some deep part of our secret selves, revealing surprising truths we didn’t know we knew. We talk about the...
Cinemadope: Rise and Shine, undocumented workers unionize
When we talk about unions, the images that are usually called to mind are those of the Rust Belt —a ging steel mills and auto plants whose unionized workforces were long considered the backbone of American industry. And while the allure of collective bargaining may...
CinemaDope: Just Dropping In, Films in limited screenings
One of the great benefits of the digital revolution is that it has opened up our movie screens in ways the old paradigm could never have allowed. Under the old system, screening a film was always a pricey endeavor, even if it ran for a few weeks. To show a film for a...
Cinemadope: Going the distance, The Pioneer Valley Jewish Film Festival turns 10
In any field, a decade is a milestone — one of those moments when one can stop to look back and reflect on all the hard work that has gone into getting to that point in the journey. For a film festival, it’s particularly remarkable. There is just so much that goes...
Cinemadope: The Art of War
All of us, at some point or another, have a teacher who makes a difference. Maybe it’s just that we cross paths at the right moment, or maybe it’s just that he or she is that damn good at what they do, but the right teacher at the right time can change a person’s path...
Cinemadope: Sweet and Hot, Three stories of Asian flavors
Everyone with a go-to Chinese take-out joint is sure of one thing: theirs is the best. It’s a partisan game on a par with Left vs. Right or The Beatles vs. The Stones — I once witnessed, on a Brooklyn street corner, a heated argument about the neighborhood’s best...
Cinemadope: French Twist, A surprisingly resilient piece of sci-fi
During the waves of police brutality protests that rolled across the nation this last half-year, there were any number of arresting images: protestors pouring milk in their eyes to counteract the tear gas used to disperse crowds; a highway patrolman leading a peaceful...
Cinemadope
At long, long, last, I can finally announce: this is the last Cinemadope column of this long, long winter. Next week, spring will be upon us, at least by the calendar, and we can all begin to forget the frigid and snowbound Sartre play that this winter has been. To...
Cinemadope: HerStory, Early feminism and UFOs
I’m not sure exactly when it was that I realized that my mom wasn’t quite like most of the other moms in our neighborhood. And from the outside, at least when I was still a boy, maybe she didn’t strike others as different, either: husband, two kids, house, a station...
Cinemadope: Colorizing Winter, Saturday morning cartoons and a ’60s era gem
As we turn the corner into March, the kids have headed back to school, leaving the rest of New England to get back to the important business of shoveling out parking spaces and shoring up roofs creaking under the weight of ice dams. But if this long winter is starting...
Cinemadope: Old Masters, New Looks
Ask just about anyone to name a famous painting, and it’s a good bet that “The Mona Lisa” will be the first thing to jump to most people’s lips. Da Vinci’s most famous work — and bear in mind, this is from the guy who also painted “The Last Supper” — may be on the...
Cinemadope: Beg, Borrow, and Steal; movies and adaption
It’s no secret that, more than just about any other medium, cinema has relied on — and thrived on — adapting material from other art forms. Whether it is as traditional as a new production of an old classic (see any number of period piece dramas) or as unusual as...
Cinemadope: Cracking the Enigma
As a young and nerdish boy, I was obsessed with words. I collected them the way a lepidopterist might collect moths, catching them on the wing and pinning them down to puzzle out their origins, oddities, and family ties to other words. It all felt like a marvelously...
CinemaDope: Southern Exposure, an immigrant’s dangerous journey
The people who run the show over at Amherst Cinema have never been content with the idea that their venue is a mere movie theater. From the start, the vision of the theater encompassed not just great film, but also community enrichment, education, and more. As the...E-Edition
Best Of 2024
Readers Choice 2024
