Movies

The best characters are little people with outsized ideas of where they should be. East Side Sushi, a small, low-budget indie, is populated with them. But the scale and proportionality is important – these are not people who aim to be astronauts, CEOs or leaders of the free world. A job with health benefits will […]

Sunday marked the death of Idrissa Ouédraogo, Burkina Faso’s most renowned filmmaker. If you haven’t heard of him, that’s okay. Most people haven’t heard of Burkina Faso. I wouldn’t know Ouédraogo’s work either if not for a free film series I attended faithfully when I lived in Richmond. Even though my degree is in film […]

The internet is not the truth, but sometimes it exhibits a common grace. A sampling of websites and forums, for example, will teach a writer the proper form of address for a female superior officer. (If you don’t know, it’s ma’am.) If instead you relied on television writers, you would think sir was proper. I […]

I have worked as a journalist and a documentarian, and I can attest the worst thing either can do is to approach a story with an agendum*. I can also attest that this is exactly what the majority of journalists and documentarians do. Agenda have worked well for Barbara Kopple and Michael Moore, but journalists […]

For the first five films, click here. The Son and The Child (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) The Belgian Daredenne brothers, who made Kid with a Bike, also crafted these two movies with similar titles. The Son (Le Fils) is about a man (Olivier Gourmet in a masterful performance) who ends up tutoring the youth who murdered his young child years ago. Who […]

I have written that many elements of The Judgment of Parrish derive from my own experience as a dad. I love my two sons, and I populated the character of Parrish with some of their quirks, sensitivities, and challenges. I also found it easy to “method-write” the father character of Paul, with all his impatience, self-importance, and, eventually, […]