?Life is delicioso; you just have to bite it.? Team Marco, from director Julio Vincent Gambuto, is a story about generations learning from each other. It asks us to look up from our screens to see the world, and more importantly, the people around us. It also reminds...
?The way a state functions can crush people sometimes.? In 2015 a fire broke out in Colectiv, a Bucharest nightclub. Twenty-seven people died because there was only one exit. The corruption that allowed that to happen enraged the populace and led to the fall of the...
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...