I’m the kind of media consumer who churns between streaming services like I was making butter. I keep a calendar with cancellation reminders; I scour the Just Watch app for the best deal on my desired film; and lately, I’ve loaded more library cards into free services like Hoopla or Kanopy than I have credit…
Category: Screen Scene
A filmmaker thinks about the movies.
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RIP Godard
When news editor Will Carruthers offhandedly suggested I write a dispatch from the set, he had no idea I had been keeping a production diary. Films are what I do when I’m not newspapering, and this particular film, presently titled Wolf Story, is a bit of Gen X angst spun as a rom-com but with fangs…
It all began in a community college course circa 1993 when Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf met my contrarian attitude toward required reading. I ached through a few chapters of the slender novel, which proved to be a valentine of sorts to its author’s shrink, Carl Jung (whom we can thank for archetypal psychology and a surname that will…
There was a time when, for the price of a nickel, diners could participate in a uniquely American food phenom. The Automat anticipated both the worlds of fast food and “self-serve,” became a social institution, then vanished into obscurity. Founded by entrepreneurs Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart in the late 1880s, their restaurant concept was…
Since the late ’80s, San Rafael’s Bedrock Music and Video is very likely the place where a generation of Marinites bought their first CDs, rented their “Thursday Rental Specials” and otherwise browsed away an afternoon on the Miracle Mile before decamping to Caffé Nuvo. And now it’s closing for good. It’s another end to an…