Reaction Shots

Credit: Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett; Everett; Buena Vista/Everett. Source: ew.com I don’t usually write obits. The last one I did was on another platform for David Bowie because, well, David Bowie. It mingle be difficult for more recent generations to get, but Redford was very much part of the zeitgeist when I was coming up. He wasn’t just a heartthrob matinee idol; he was as much a player in the New Hollywood as, say, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, and his peers more resolutely known for exploring the harsher dimensions of life in the seventies. By contrast, while Redford was very much a “movie star”, he was an accomplished actor and much of his work centered on the more slippery nature of relationships, bruised loves, and eventually, exploring the ramifications of political decisions in the U.S. I doubt if he’d want to hear his work framed that way, but that’s how his evolution struck me as a kid. And it’s stayed with me since. In some ways, he was almost borderline square until ...

  Okay. Over on another blog, I post a bi-weekly gallery of memes of a distinctly political bent. Today, over at Bluesky, a couple of users have hosted a virtual holodeck of a party in celebration of the storied franchise and I wasn’t going to descend to the depths of punning like everyone else. Until I did. Thus, I dedicate this to my Bluesky pals and in celebration of this special day! Let the chuckles and moans begin!

Walking out of Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t! , co-written with his wife and editor Tricia Cooke, I felt like some of the earlier viewers of The Big Lebowski who just didn’t get it. The big difference here is that I LOVED The Big Lebowski (and still do) and it is also a much more accomplished film.  As the second part of Coen and Cooke’s “Lesbian Trilogy” that kicked off with Drive-Away Dolls , I was expecting something more along the lines of   that   film. I was expecting a fairly tight, extremely funny, confection that I’d be happy to see again (and did!); what I got with the current film is a structurally loose, maybe even sloppy in places, shaggy dog story that amounts to remarkably little. I didn’t dislike the film, but it left me wondering,”why?” There were elements that worked, until they didn’t and plot and character developments that just ran counter to whatever came before, and dare I say, the fridging of a lesbian character that really kind of pissed me off. I’m n...