Film
by Jack Brown | Jan 22, 2010 | Film
Up in the AirDirected by Jason Reitman. Written by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on the novel by Walter Kirn. With George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman, Danny McBride, and Zach Galifianakis. (R)There's a moment in Jason...
by Jack Brown | Feb 19, 2014 | Film
Last fall, my life changed in a big way when my wife and I welcomed twins into the world. Since then our life at home has been a beautiful whirlwind of milestone moments, naps caught on the fly, and laundry. Lots and lots of laundry. One thing that has definitely, if...
by Jack Brown | Jan 28, 2010 | Film
A question: what does I Love You Phillip Morris, an “improbable but true” story of an ex-con’s quest for true love, have in common with art-house hits like An Education, (500) Days of Summer, and Adventureland? A couple of things, actually. All four...
by Jack Brown | Feb 26, 2014 | Film
An argument could be made that today is the true golden age of animation. Certainly there is more of it available than ever before, in a dizzying array of styles and viewing formats. (Look up 1A4Studio on YouTube for one of my favorite formats—feature films like...
by Jack Brown | Jan 29, 2010 | Film
A Single ManDirected by Tom Ford. Written by Tom Ford and David Scearce, based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood. With Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult, Matthew Goode, Jon Kortajarena. (R)Press coverage of A Single Man has been, rightly, somewhat...
by Jack Brown | Mar 4, 2014 | Film
When I wrote my first CinemaDope column—almost seven years ago now—it was with the thought that I’d be using my corner of the Advocate to cover film in and around the Valley. And by and large, that’s what I’ve done; there has never been a...
by Jack Brown | Feb 4, 2010 | Film
Readers of the Advocate are perhaps more likely than most to be familiar with names like Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland—names that, to many, stand for much of what is wrong with our modern agricultural practices. Whether it’s a concern with...
by Jack Brown | Mar 12, 2014 | Film
Spring is just around the bend—or so I keep telling myself while I shovel out the car—and with it comes the beauty of baseball. Now, I’m not the sort who talks about the “beautiful geometry” of the game, and I’m certainly no...
by Jack Brown | Feb 11, 2010 | Film
I ran an errand for an accordion-playing friend this week, and as I drove down Route 116 past Mount Sugarloaf—Sunderland being the unlikely home of a world-class accordion shop—the majestic views reminded me that this was the week that we locals would...
by Jack Brown | Jan 29, 2014 | Film
It’s an odd thing about a lot of what we consider kids’ movies—so few of them, really, are just for kids. Partly, it’s just a business call; appealing to parents is a smart move in a market overcrowded with candy-colored come-ons. But brush...
by Jack Brown | Feb 18, 2010 | Film
Some people say that the culture of the Valley is too permissive, too coddling. What they mean, really, is that it's too generous. They see the panhandlers lining Northampton's Main Street and mutter unkind words; they see people standing up for the rights of...
by Jack Brown | Dec 31, 2013 | Film
When I was growing up, Sundays were newspaper days. Each week, my father would take my brother and me off to buy a stack of different papers, each in multiple copies, so that when we subsequently arrived at my grandmother’s house, no one would be forced to give...
by Jack Brown | Feb 25, 2010 | Film
It’s that time of year again. The 2010 Oscar nominations were released last week, and with the Academy Awards now less than a month away, film lovers are about to be inundated with an endless parade of columns filled with puffery and prognostication. This is...
by Jack Brown | Jan 21, 2014 | Film
We Americans love our underdogs. From day one, our national bent has been to celebrate the striver: the immigrant who arrived with spare change but went on to build an empire is the American Dream. And even if most of us never quite see that sort of success—the...
by Jack Brown | Feb 25, 2010 | Film
If you're a young man—say, between 18 and 23, and with a good bit of disposable income—this column is likely not for you. Besides, you're already being bombarded with advertisements and tie-ins for all the movies you want to see, and probably a few...
by Jack Brown | Nov 19, 2013 | Film
Here in the Pioneer Valley, it’s easy to get complacent about our entertainment. So many of our hometowns do such a great job of providing us with a smorgasbord of rich cultural offerings that we can sometimes forget to look past our own borders. So it may come...
by Jack Brown | Mar 4, 2010 | Film
One of the more enjoyable pieces of the Oscar race has always been getting to see the collection of live-action and animated shorts that make the awards cut from year to year. It’s a way to get a fix of some high-quality filmmaking without the time commitment...
by Jack Brown | Jan 14, 2014 | Film
Revenge and retribution seem to be on people’s minds these days. Turn on the television most nights, and you’ll find levels of back-stabbing and double-crossing not seen in prime time since people were wondering who shot JR. (It’s a reference, young...
by Jack Brown | Mar 11, 2010 | Film
When I was a kid, one of the first bits of culture my father and I bonded over was Saturday morning television. Parents today might scoff (and don’t worry, we did read books), but back then weekend TV wasn’t just a candy-colored substitute for day care. A...
by Jack Brown | Nov 27, 2013 | Film
As a new parent, I’ve been struck over and over again by just how richly documented our world is today. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that, after just seven and a half weeks, my trove of newborn photos had already far surpassed the accumulated...
by Jack Brown | Mar 18, 2010 | Film
Movies have been compared to many things over the years, but the comparison that I’ve been thinking of lately is how much they’re like bears. Fiberglass bears, to be precise. Valley residents will surely recall Easthampton’s recent public art...
by Jack Brown | Dec 4, 2013 | Film
I’m a sucker for Christmas. Even in the dead heat of a summer afternoon, I can often be caught humming a few bars of a carol while I whack away at weeds and mosquitoes. It is, quite frankly, bothersome, although mostly to the Scrooges who cluck their tongues and...
by Jack Brown | Mar 25, 2010 | Film
So another Oscar season has come and gone. By most accounts this year turned out pretty well, at least as far as the ceremony goes. Even when they were stuck working with boilerplate awards-show comedy, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin proved a capable comic pair, though...
by Jack Brown | Dec 10, 2013 | Film
With Thanksgiving in the rearview mirror, the season is now fully upon us. And by “season,” I don’t mean the gift-giving or tree-trimming, or any of the other bits of pine-scented magic that drift over the nation during the last few weeks of the...
by Jack Brown | Mar 26, 2010 | Film
The ritual of Daylight Saving Time has recently ushered in its yearly sense of renewal, lightening the mood—if you’ll pardon the pun—of just about everyone. People are talking about the fresh beauty of the annual Spring Bulb Show at Smith College,...
by Jack Brown | Dec 24, 2013 | Film
Whenever I plug in an iPod, my father likes to tell me the story of his first year of college. Back then, goes the story, he was the only guy on his dormitory floor who owned a record player, and whenever a new album came out, the gang would rush back to his room to...
by Jack Brown | Apr 1, 2010 | Film
Much like the world of film, the world of music is often divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller boxes. What was once just “a movie” became a drama or a comedy, only to be faced with more decisions: thriller or adventure, farce or slapstick,...
by Jack Brown | Dec 17, 2013 | Film
Traditions start flying pretty fast and furious this time of year, some more welcome than others. Trees in the living room, new sweaters, and rich, boozy, drinks? Bring it on. Trying to find just the right thing for that hard to buy for relative? Not so much. Film is...
by Jack Brown | Apr 2, 2010 | Film
One of the wonderful things about having an independent theater in your community is that such theaters tend to be receptive to ideas that other, bigger theaters might dismiss as not worth the effort: mini-festivals about farming, or free screenings of films about...
by Jack Brown | Jul 23, 2014 | Film
For viewers of a certain age, the late Roger Ebert was the beginning and the end of film criticism, or at least half of it. His work with fellow critic and professional sparring partner Gene Siskel (Ebert hailed from the Chicago Sun-Times; Siskel from the rival...
by Jack Brown | Apr 8, 2010 | Film
It usually happens at a dinner party or art opening: I meet someone new, and conversation eventually winds its way to the inevitable question. “So, what do you do?” my new friend asks. Whenever this happens, I pause, and relish the moment. Because as...
by Jack Brown | Jun 11, 2014 | Film
As I sit down to write this column each week, I’m constantly amazed at the richness of our Valley’s film scene. After logging over a half a decade in print, I’d be hard pressed to remember a single instance when I struggled to find something...
by Jack Brown | Apr 9, 2010 | Film
There is no shortage of movie screens in the Pioneer Valley. Off the top of my head, I can come up with several dozen within a 15- or 20-minute drive of my home without pausing to include the smaller screens to be found on college campuses or community media centers....
by Sady Doyle | Jun 18, 2014 | Film
I would love to report that Maleficent is a great movie. Unfortunately, it’s a muddled, inconsistent junk heap of a movie at best. Its bad scenes are abysmally terrible, and even its good scenes (which can be very good) suffer from taking place within a bad...
by Jack Brown | Apr 15, 2010 | Film
If you’re a fan of jazz, you’re probably familiar with the idea of standards, maybe even without realizing it. Standards are those chestnuts that you hear on dozens of different recordings: take, for instance, the 1931 song “All of Me.” Louis...
by Jack Brown | Jul 2, 2014 | Film
If it’s true that there’s no business like show business, it’s also a fact that there’s no one thing that sums up the industry. Consider just a single movie shoot—look at the credit roll of any recent film, and it’s likely to be...
by Jack Brown | Apr 16, 2010 | Film
In just a little under two years, the Northampton-based Out! For Reel Film Series has firmly established itself as a strong cultural leader in the lesbian, gay, bi, and trans community. Since launching in the fall of 2008, the series has twice filled the 800 seats at...
by Jack Brown | Jul 9, 2014 | Film
For generations, children everywhere—and the adults who read to them—have been lucky to have the worlds of Roald Dahl to spark, mix and mingle with their own imaginations. The author, whose darker stories find echoes today in the work of writers like...
by Jack Brown | Apr 22, 2010 | Film
We in the Valley are blessed with a vibrant restaurant scene. The wide variety of cuisines in our local eateries is a boon to downtown economies and gastronomes alike, creating a near-perfect circular relationship. If I asked, you could probably call to mind the last...
by Jack Brown | Jul 16, 2014 | Film
There was a time, I’m sure, when using Citizen Kane as a benchmark—when one could say with some seriousness, for instance, that Cabaret was the Citizen Kane of musicals—still meant something. That time is now past. The sprinkling of Kane comparisons...
by Jack Brown | Apr 23, 2010 | Film
If you’re the PBS type—and if you live in the Valley, there’s a good chance you are—you’ll probably remember the mid-’90s phenomenon that was Hoop Dreams. Filmmaker Frederick Marx’s collaboration with director Steve James...
by Jack Brown | Jul 30, 2014 | Film
The intersection of Hollywood and the Internet Age has seen its share of fender-benders and near misses, as well as a few straight-up wrecks. Both artistically and technologically, the two sides have had to warm up to each other slowly, with traditional media empires...
by Jack Brown | Apr 29, 2010 | Film
Once every 10 or 12 days, I find myself hauling a couple of bags of household trash down to the dumpster behind our building. It’s a longish walk, and by the time it ends those bags can start to feel awfully heavy; when I finally reach my destination, I often...
by Jack Brown | Aug 6, 2014 | Film
It’s barely been 10 months since my wife and I brought our twins into the world, but when I look back at pictures from the first few weeks they were with us, I’m always shocked to see how much they’ve grown. It’s not just that they’ve...
by Jack Brown | Apr 30, 2010 | Film
In the world of animation, there are few approaches that can match the stop-motion method for creating a human touch. It isn’t that the slightly herky-jerky results are themselves particularly life-like—should you see someone moving that way while...
by Jack Brown | Aug 14, 2014 | Film
What makes a film a classic? It’s one of those questions that has both a thousand answers and none, and is often defined more by the person asking it than by the work itself. Usually, we chalk it up to time and a vague collective consciousness—not...
by Jack Brown | May 6, 2010 | Film
Growing up in a small town, I learned early on not to be picky about where I found my art. Great paintings—at least, I thought they were great—could be found in local banks and doctors’ offices, and my first artistic hero was a guy who did...
by Jack Brown | Jun 25, 2014 | Film
Theaters running the occasional old classic is nothing new. Indeed, many make a habit of it—an annual screening of Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz is an almost sure-fire way to pad the bottom line. But most often these chestnuts are used to fill the...
by Jack Brown | May 7, 2010 | Film
There’s a famous story about Buster Keaton that sums up a lot of his knockabout life in vaudeville and Hollywood. It takes place during the filming of Sherlock, Jr. (now recognized as a groundbreaking marvel, it was a bit of a flop in its day), in a scene where...
by Jack Brown | Jun 11, 2014 | Film
As someone who spends a fair bit of time in the world of words, it is not without a bit of embarrassment, and even something approaching shame, that I admit this: I’ve never made it through Ulysses. The landmark novel by James Joyce, nearly a century old now, is...
by Jack Brown | May 13, 2010 | Film
The Sundays of my youth were days of tradition. This was mostly thanks to my father, a man fond of tradition and of the family ties that kept those rituals close. When I was born, we lived in an apartment building next door to my grandparents. Almost 40 years and...
by Jack Brown | Jun 4, 2014 | Film
If there are two things that might sum up a great swath of our American culture, cars and junk food must be near the top of the list. Maybe the adrenaline rush of the first—those muscle cars and gas-guzzlers roaring down our highways—is just the adult...
by Jack Brown | May 14, 2010 | Film
The Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition, which celebrated its 30th year not long ago, has a storied history as an advocate for the two-wheeler. Launched in 1977 by a trio of Bostonians, it quickly moved to publish bike maps and safety manuals, one of which has recently...
by Jack Brown | Apr 9, 2014 | Film
There aren’t too many directors who can lay claim to their own adjective. Even our best-known filmmakers today don’t usually make the grade—you never hear people describing anything as Spielbergian or Scorsesian, however powerful their stories might...
by Jack Brown | May 20, 2010 | Film
When the news of bin Laden broke last week, it was a strange sort of shock. Almost a decade after our country started a global manhunt, it had come to an abrupt and rather unexpected end—we had been searching for so long that it had become, perversely, nearly...
by Jack Brown | Apr 16, 2014 | Film
Oscar season has come and gone once again, and film geeks may be feeling a familiar emptiness with its passing. Gone is the bingo-card thrill of picking the winners, gone is the once-a-year cocktail recipe your party-throwing friends decide to try out on the night of...
by Jack Brown | May 21, 2010 | Film
Over the years, the Northampton/Amherst area has been home base for any number of well-known personalities. The laundry list of bold-face names includes rock stars and authors, radio hosts and fashion designers, and a decent smattering of just about everything in...
by Jack Brown | Apr 23, 2014 | Film
Truth be told, I’ve always been a basketball man. I had the standard brief flirtations with soccer and tennis that many American youths of my era did before sports more familiar to my parents took over: first it was baseball; later, as my natural lankiness took...
by Jack Brown | May 27, 2010 | Film
The Pioneer Valley is no stranger to Hollywood. Over the years, its rich variety of landscapes—and, perhaps, the chance to recreate another place on the cheap—have lured many a film crew in search of a set. Most recently, a Mel Gibson thriller took over...
by Jack Brown | Apr 30, 2014 | Film
War is hell, the saying goes. But what it leaves off is that hell doesn’t always stay behind when a soldier comes home. In the last hundred years or so of human history we’ve fought some terrible conflicts, and if today we’re slightly better at...
