LEAVE NO TRACEMOVIE REVIEW My husband and I watched Leave No Trace last night. He hated it. He thought the movie was bleak and sad. He felt furious with the father during the entire film. I loved the movie—the nuanced acting, the plot, the camerawork, the casting choices, the understated and unexpected way that the screenwriters, […]
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IF BEALE STREET COULD TALKMOVIE REVIEW Every Friday, I read the movie reviews in The Washington Post.The articles usually help me find great films and steer away from bad ones, with one notable exception: Adam Sandler’s Punch Drunk Love. They liked it. I loathed it and loath is too nice a word for how I
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VIRGIL WANDERBOOK REVIEW I have the attention span of a fruit fly. Whether in a movie or book, pacing is important to me. When a movie is slow, I’ve been known to hit fast forward, then read the subtitles as I zoom to the end. Virgil Wanderstarts slowly, but I hung in through the first
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WORDS YOU NEVER WANT TO HEAR 0:00 / 0:00 Words You Never Want to Hear A couple of weeks ago, at the end of a cut, my stylist said, “Hmm…your hair looks strange.” A week of high humidity had made me resemble a poodle. Perhaps that’s what she meant. As you might imagine, her statement
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ON THE ADVISABILITY OF SWEARING 0:00 / 0:00 Swearing Recently, after four attempts, a TSA agent failed to collect a non-fuzzy image of my fingerprints. No matter how firmly I pressed and no matter how I positioned my hand, the device would not record my prints crisply. Maybe I should be grateful. My inability to
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LIVING FOREVER 0:00 / 0:00 Living Forever My dad died a few years ago. Even though he needed a pacemaker to regulate his heart and he was a brittle, non-compliant diabetic, his death still shocked us. Often, my father would start a sentence, “If I ever die….”–as if the inevitability of his death was nota foregone
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IF I WAS YOU 0:00 / 0:00 If I Was You In my hip hop class, we dance to a Meghan Trainor song whose lyrics are: “If I was you, I would wanna be me, too. I would wanna be me, too.” People perk up during this song. We’re more likely to strut, rather than
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A QUIET PLACEMOVIE REVIEW I do not like horror movies. They scare me. Until recently, I’ve only watched two in my life: The Haunting of Hill Houseand The Sixth Sense. Here is a terrifying clip from The Haunting of Hill House. Don’t watch it. The scariest scene in The Sixth Sense is when kitchen cabinets
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FROG IN HER THROAT 0:00 / 0:00 Frog in Her Throat I used to phone my grandmother every Saturday morning. Although Benedetta died few years ago at age 106, on some Saturday mornings I still wake up ready to dial her number. We’d start out the same way: “How are you, Grandma?” “I’ve got a
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LOCALLY SOURCED PET TO TABLE DINING 0:00 / 0:00 Pet to Table Dining Growing up, I desperately wanted a pet. We lived in a tenement bordered by an asphalt driveway in the back and a concrete sidewalk in the front. Our apartment was so tiny that we needed only a cook stove to heat the
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