Adventures in Words

At this point in its young life, this blog is pretty much a friends and family enterprise … which means every voice counts. So thanks to a suggestion from  Bernadette Walter , let's talk about “Mank.” David Fincher directed Netflix's top Golden Globe contender to six nominations. Working from a script by his father Jack Fincher, he crafts a sun-drenched, wide-angle return to California in the '30s. It bounces from Hollywood's RKO Studios to William Randolph Hearst's opulent-beyond-belief castle, San Simeon, to pull back the curtain on the making of instant cinema classic, “Citizen Kane.” Mank is the nickname of Herman Mankiewicz, who shared the screenwriting credit with director-star Orson Welles. At age 24, Welles  (Tom Burke)  was already being hailed as a genius auteur, despite having directed only one full-length picture. Oscar-winning chameleon Gary Oldman plays Mank, whose Shakespearean writing sensibilities and sardonic wit are never more than one step ahead

  The Sooner Theatre in Norman, Oklahoma, had seen better days when this photo was taken. The Sooner was the launch pad for most of my fantasies when I was growing up in Norman. The Sooner  avoided a last picture show ending when it was converted into a performing arts center and Norman's Main Street came back to life as an arts district.  Photo from “Ticket to Paradise – American Movie Theaters and How We Had Fun” by John Margolies and Emily Gwathmey Movie awards are like Santa Claus. It's can be devastating when you discover that neither of them are real. I had lots of times to reflect on my love affair with movies during what I now artistically call my orange period.  It began in boyhood, when going to the Sooner Theatre by the Santa Fe railroad tracks in the Dust Bowl college town of Norman, Oklahoma, wasn't so much as escape as a passage to a magical  Somewhere Else .  Lots of somewheres, actually, full of distant adventures, Jerry Lewis laughs, and dewy stirrings of s

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1247592729? Pieces of  “Nomadland ” have been all over my screens lately in an ad blitz for the film's release on Hulu. Starring  Frances McDormand  and directed by  Chloé Zhao,  it's also been at the top of Oscar forecasts for best picture ever since its release in festivals last autumn, which is when I saw it. It's the story of a woman named Fern who's been living in her white Ford van ever since the gypsum plant closed in Empire, Nevada. It took her home and rest of the town down with it. Even the zip code was eliminated, as reported in  Jessica Bruder ’s 2017 nonfiction book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century,” that the author and director adapted into the screenplay. Fern's  husband died about the same time the town did, leaving her in her current state, homeless, rootless, adrift on the map of America like so many others in these changing times. The ads highlight the magical realism of of Zhao's filmmakin

 Thanks to my friend  Barry Wurst , I'm still a member of the Hawaii Film Critics Society. There are many reasons I shouldn't be. I retired from being a newspaper entertainment editor almost a decade ago and stopped being a columnist some years after that. After the hundreds of thousands of words and drums of ink devoted to writing about moviemaking, my official credentials and the free tickets that came with them have been over for a while now. I'm not even a  Hawaii  film critic for the time being. I'm still in Tucson, stuck in my own movie that can't decide whether it's “Groundhog Day” in the age of Covid, a gritty Quentin Tarantino nouveau Western, or a Hallmark Channel heart warmer called “Meet the Grandparents.”  It's obviously more authentic – although more dangerous and perplexing – trying to write your way through your own movie than it is to lob bon mots at films made by others. But Barry, a dedicated film reviewer and popular Maui College media in

 The guy doesn't know what love is. The closest he can come is the bloodlust he engenders in a mob of strangers, their intellects full of holes like sponges to soak up his venom. “Now that's what I'm sayin',” they say, loving that Queens gameshow host voice, whining with arrogance and victimhood in every breath. “He's our voice” they say, even though he sounds nothing like them. “This is what the leader of America should look like. Whatever he says, that's what I say.” “He” – who has nothing but contempt for people like them who buy their clothes at Walmart, but like them, likes lots of ketchup on his food – “is us.” Actually, he's not. Beyond having tapped into their resentments of people smarter than they are, or otherwise more entitled, they have nothing in common. “I love you,” he tells them, even though he doesn't. He lies. He doesn't know them. He doesn't know what love is. “We love you,” they yell back, and mean it. “Tell us what to do. Te