I recently had an opportunity to join with some other writers in a roundtable interview with Ron Howard, director of Hillbilly Elegy, based on the memoir by J.D. Vance about growing up in Appalachia and the Rust Belt and eventually going to Yale Law School. The film...
We may think of baseball as the American Pastime, but we are not the only place that loves the game. Baseball is also a very popular sport in Japan, and has been for over 100 years. Each year, there is a nationwide high school tournament leading up to crowning a...
?Cowboy?s not what you do; it?s who you are, It?s just something in you.? One of the key mythic icons of American life is the cowboy. Most young boys, and probably many girls as well, dream of being a cowboy when they grow up. Few actually become cowboys. In Cowboys,...
?Where we come from is who we are, but we choose every day who we become.? J. D. Vance?s bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy has been brought to the screen by Ron Howard. The memoir recounted Vance?s childhood in the Ohio Rust Belt, where he was raised by a mother...
?I?m afraid one day you?ll end up in a cage. ?I?m already in a cage!? Wolfwalkers is the third offering from Cartoon Saloon that focuses on Irish folklore. Like the earlier films, Secret of the Kells and Song of the Sea, this is a brilliantly artistic animated...
?I have had enough.? How should we think of war? Is it a romantic, idealized story of heroics? Is it hell, as General Sherman said? Do we accept that ?all?s fair? in war? Are there rules of morality that we must follow to maintain our humanity? Recon, written and...
Waiting. But for what? Jeff Roda?s 18 to Party is all about waiting. It is the kind of waiting we have all experienced?waiting for life. Set in 1984, we spend an afternoon and evening with a group of eighth graders outside a local teen nightclub. But they can?t go in...
A broken relationship fueled by grief is the engine that runs Johannes Nyholm?s Koko-di Koko-da. The film is prefaced with a vacation Tobias and Elin are taking with their young daughter Maya. They are hit with a seemingly innocuous case food poisoning, but it changes...
?Are you sorry you woke up?? What makes it worth living for another day, or two, or a few months? In Eric Styles?s film That Good Night, based on a play by N.J. Crisp, that becomes the real question, not just to be or not to be. Ralph (the late John Herd in his final...