On Movies & Media

I want to read perspectives and interpretations... not assessments of "I liked it" or "It sucked." When I was a child watching Siskel and Ebert, the thumbs-up/thumbs-down was a suspenseful gimmick; I couldn't wait to see the sparks fly when the critics' thumb-ation of the film put them odds. But it was what they said beyond that, the thought process that inspired the thumb-arization, that affected me. They taught me that people could disagree on a film without one person being Right and the other person being Wrong.

Do you feel the tremors? Yeah, that's the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie in theaters. In-depth reviews are popping up everywhere. Here are links to some that I've found very helpful.

In celebration of the birthday of the late, great Jim Henson, Comment Magazine has posted a letter I wrote to Jim Henson's ghost...

Seven years ago this week, I met Joss Whedon and the cast of Serenity. Here, in their entirety for the first time, are my transcripts from those conversations.

As we're in a season busy with film festivals, I'm reading reviews of what sound like extremely challenging movies. Some of those reviews sound like the kind of comments that might provoke filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami to repeat what he said here...

Five years ago, on September 27, Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" screened for the first time. And a sure-thing Best Actor Oscar-winner came into plain view. Daniel Plainview, to be precise.