the city in film
For June, my “Plan to Watch” column in Planning features films about home-building, including Buster Keaton’s One Week, Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, and Herself from Phyllida Lloyd. (Be sure to also click the link to learn about Home Made: A Story of Ready-Made House Building, a promotional film from Ford Motor Company on ready-made housing, a DIY-craze from an earlier era.)
Read the full article in Planning.
I had a lot of fun reviewing Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland for The Arts Fuse, which was nicely paired with a commentary from Peg Aloi.
In the same year you got your license, you saw Easy Rider at the drive-in and were turned on by Canned Heat singing “Going Up the Country” at Woodstock, followed by a steady diet of “Going Mobile,” “Going to California,” and counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. The highway was calling and you rose to answer — but then life intervened, with a husband and a mortgage and a job at the gypsum plant and shopping lists and gutters to clean and 1,001 other daily responsibilities and hassles, and being on the road was just something Willie Nelson would sing about on the jukebox.
And then like that, decades later, with a whoosh of the undertow and a great sucking sound, the plant closed and the bottom dropped out of the world and everything that was once stable evaporated – husband, job, house, community – and all that was left was you and the road again….
To read more, see The Arts Fuse — and be sure to also read Peg’s commentary on the site as well. (And for fun, check out this Nomadland “filmerick”, too.)
Now out on the Arts Fuse, my review of Herself, Phyllida Lloyd’s new feature produced in partnership between Amazon Studios and Screen Ireland.
Through this classic cinema framing, we come in for the close up: by watching Sandra’s story — by attending to this particular life, as lived and experienced slowly, by this individual — we may hope to understand a more general story playing out elsewhere.
Sadly, this “elsewhere” is more accurately an “everywhere,” as there are loads of Sandras not just in Dublin, but in Dayton, Durban, Dallas, Dubai, Delhi, and Da Nang — as well as right here in Boston and its suburbs. Based on a true story and reminiscent of too many others, Sandra is a mother fleeing an abusive spouse, hoping to find a safe home for her children in a world where even something this simple would seem to require a miracle.
To read the full review, click here. To watch this film, head to Amazon Prime.