Imagine a gangster film in which nothing happens. That’s where I thought I was for the first half of this movie, in a film about what gangsters are like when they’re on vacation and not being gangsters. Not that this is a bad thing. The first half of In Bruges is the best part. Nothing […]

Here I am at my parents’ final resting place. “Resting” being an understatement, since their activities may also include flying, swirling, scudding, and fertilizing giant fir trees. My mom passed away a little over a year ago, and my father twelve years back. His ashes have since resided in a kind of shrine I built […]

A few years back, when we were in Rome, we visited the Domus Aurea, the Golden House built by the Emperor Nero during the last years of his reign. This fabulous 300-room palace was the centerpiece of Nero’s entertainment empire— walls were plated with fabulous marbles, or ivory, or frescos. A large part of the […]

Doctor Strangelove would seem to be my favorite movie. I believe I’ve seen it more often than any other film— I’ve watched Slim Pickens ride that H-Bomb to Laputa something like twenty times. It was Strangelove that popularized the notion of the Doomsday Device. (The Doomsday Bomb was actually conceived by Leo Szilard, who also […]