by Jack Brown | Apr 6, 2018 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Newsletter
After a long winter, spring has returned to Western Mass. And with it, as hotly anticipated as any crocus, comes a new season of Red Sox baseball. It’s a tradition that we have come to take for granted, and even when it’s not a great season — let’s face it,...
by Jack Brown | Apr 2, 2018 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Newsletter
Live in New England long enough, and it’s easy to begin to take it for granted. The deeply quiet winters, the burst and blaze of autumn, the summer thunderstorm that chases away July’s heavy heat — our seasonal weather and landscapes become a way to mark our calendar...
by Jack Brown | Mar 26, 2018 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Film
So much can depend on a word. Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary about race and the sprawling prison-industrial complex that has bloomed in modern America is called “13th,” but it could very well have been titled with another single word: “Except.” That word, nestled...
by Jack Brown | Mar 19, 2018 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Film, Newsletter
When Tommy Wiseau’s film The Room finally found its audience, it was as a famously awful piece of filmmaking — watching it was like seeing a tornado tear through a garbage dump. Whether or not the director has ever fully grasped the workings of his fame is still an...
by Jack Brown | Mar 12, 2018 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Newsletter
It couldn’t have been easy to be known as The Most Beautiful Woman in the World. But that was the way actress Hedy Lamarr was presented to American audiences by studio head Louis B. Mayer, who came across the star during a European jaunt in the late 1930s. By then,...