With our ASL Opera project picking up steam, I was curious to know just how the “High Art” of Opera has influenced mainstream American culture over the last 50 years or so, and I was surprised to learn, via ChatGPT-4 AI, just how deeply many of the most famous Opera melodies made their way into our shared childhoods and our culturally maintained totems of relevance!
Children are some of the most vulnerable in society. They are trusting by default and unaware by necessity of nature. Popular culture and the Arts are filled with the sexual exploitation of, and the aggrieved results of, unattended children in peril with no one to protect their best interests except, oftentimes, their grooming predators.
Continue reading → Predators, Children and Sexual Prevarication
I recently wrote about a fellow who wanted my Script Doctor services via my Script Professor.com website, and the reaction to that poor guy was so fascinating across all my public and private interwebs, that I decided to offer a follow-up to that adventure. When I do script doctoring, or ghost writing, as The Script Professor, anything goes, and by that I mean, I can fix anything written that is broken — and that includes scripts for television, radio, film and books and scholarly papers and anything else that might be in need of pruning or total rehabilitation.
Continue reading → The Ghost Business: More Adventures in Script Doctoring as The Script Professor
Hart Bochner is one of those deliciously rare character actors who can grab a role and make it belong only to him. Danger is his essence. You love to loathe him. Hart usually plays the bad guy in a movie and he does the dark side so evilly well.
Over the weekend, we watched the middling 1998 movie Break Up on Netflix starring the always fantastic Bridget Fonda — who has been sadly missing in entertainment action since her 2003 car accident when she broke her back — and the always infamous Hart Bochner.
The movie stars Bridget, but the story belongs to Hart.
Continue reading → The Unrepentant: Hart Bochner Would Rather Kill You than Kiss You
With the passing of movie critic Roger Ebert this week, I have been trying to find a centerstone from which I can write about his death. Here’s what I wrote about the man on February 19, 2010 in my article — What Roger Ebert Speaks to Our Students:
Now that Roger fights on to live to write and to watch and to read and to love over and over again — any sense of our self-pity or our internal mourning is forever put to rest in the example of his unbelievable fight for an imperiled life that continues to thrive against the belly of the beast best efforts of every malignant cell and troubled tissue to take him from us. Every day we die a little, and each night, we dream a lot of the days yet to live.
The year 2012 went by rather quickly for me — one day at a time, as it were. It was a year of many moments spent with my wife and son and remarkably not too many spent attending concerts and movies as in years prior to Chaim being born — but we are quite okay with it and know that it too shall pass and we will eventually have a sitter over more than once every half a year or so.
As a nostalgic movie and television lover, I am dismayed by the modern notion of taking classic television series and turning them into movies that mock the original. Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are the current master marauder murderers of a classic original television series with the release of their horrible version of “Dark Shadows” — but this modern movie remaking trend started earlier in 1991 with “The Addams Family” retread of the television series.
Continue reading → Why Do Movie Remakes of Classic Television Series Mock instead of Honor?
Teaching a course on film can be one of the major joys of the educational process as long as both instructor and student are on the same page of expectation. You cannot spend class time watching the assigned movies. You must use that precious class time together to discuss and dissect the films frame by frame — but you cannot do that unless and until the students have watched the movies on their own time beyond the classroom.
The yearly borefest that has become the Academy Awards droned on and on last night and, as usual, the whole affair was bloated and inconsequential and wholly predictable and not even the pre-show babble could salvage the comedic fratricide:
The awards were presented during last night’s absurdly boring, completely masturbatory ceremony. Before it began, red carpet diva and American Idol host Ryan Seacrest became the butt of Sacha Baron Cohen’s alleged sense of humor, when the actor, dressed as his impossibly stupid new character from The Dictator, pretended to spill Kim Jong-Il’s ashes (actually pancake mix) on Seacrest. I’m not the biggest Seacrest fan, but this wasn’t even remotely comedic, and even made me feel sorry for Seacrest. The moment was made even more insufferable by Seacrest’s constant retelling of the story, and his fellow E! hosts’ excitement that he was “chosen” by Sacha Baron Cohen for his stupidity.
This was a spectacular year for me, all things considered. While I didn’t particularly watch a lot of television, or see too many films, it was definitely one of the best years of my life if not the best year thusfar. Let’s see why — starting with my favorite things of the year and then moving onto why I really loved the year.
Movies and Television
I didn’t go out to the movie theater too many times this year. It wasn’t a matter of not having any interest in the films being played, but rather of having my time being taken up by actual living, so to speak. When I did get to the theater, it was only for a couple of films that I really wanted to see. A bit of a contrast with, say, the summer of 2004 when Elizabeth and I somehow managed to see practically every movie playing in the theaters.
The two films that I distinctly remember seeing in theaters were the Woody Allen film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and Toy Story 3. I particularly liked You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger though, predictably, it was panned by many critics. Was it a film of tremendous substance? It certainly was not — even the film admits it in a roundabout way as it opens, referencing Macbeth who said that life was “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…” Nevertheless, this tale was a fun one to watch.
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