It’s 1971 and a timid boy noses through the crowd in a church auditorium to get a view of the movie screen. That was me, back in the Bronx at the age of five, out of our cramped apartment for a few hours with my dad. I think it was my dad. He was an abusive alcoholic,...
And my little girl's hungry mind is a bit like that AI. Even though she’s bombarded with strong emotions daily; filtering, processing, even shutting down when it’s all too much, at the end of the day she’s just looking to make sense of the world. She’s looking for...
Because we filter out those real, sometimes ugly parts of parenthood, or even just adulthood, for our kids so much now that I can’t help but think we also leave out some well-earned laughter, too. We deny our humanity to the people we're training to become little h...
...it’s aware of its own tropes and fearlessly wades into them, twists them up into new shapes, and throws them onto the screen while you stare in hungry anticipation. It’s the difference between a Jackson Pollack and spilling your soup on the carpet. And it does its m...
There aren't any movies I can think of that deal with death in the way I've seen it come to people I've loved. There are certainly no chess matches like The Seventh Seal, or trenchant, soliloquized regrets like Jason Robards' in Magnolia, although that...
So, I did what no other busy dad (who I know of) with a maniacal munchkin running around at home would ever think to do with his self-time.
I sat down and read Charlotte's Web.
When you're used to consuming the latest arts du cinema, or elbowing your way into cafe conversations focused on names like Cassavetes and Rohmer, or heck, let's throw in Refn for laughs, suddenly finding yourself slumped on a couch with your three-year-old daughter, e...
My wife and I are thoroughly modern parents. Well, we think we are, anyway. We're somewhat older than most other parents around us. We got started late, in her mid (and my late) 40's, and my daughter was only 2 when I celebrated the half-century mark. Not Charlie Cha...
You won't be surprised to hear that my 3 year old daughter gets "stuck" in front of the TV sometimes when Netflix streams her current favorites, ad infinitum, with the weekend sunshine burning away outside. It's hard for us to make the jump from our couch into active p...
