by Jack Brown | May 20, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
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...
by Jack Brown | May 13, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
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...
by Jack Brown | May 7, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
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...
by Jack Brown | Apr 29, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
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...
by Jack Brown | Mar 26, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
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...