December 2012
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Always Winter and Never Christmas? That, as everyone who's read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe knows, was the woeful situation of Narnia under the rule of the White Witch. And it's probably one phrase everyone who reads the book remembers. It's a brilliant way of capturing in a few words the significance not only…
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Weekend Music Finally, something a bit more seasonally appropriate. Not Advent-specific, obviously, but at least on the general subject. My friend Robert has been praising a collection of Christmas songs by Kathleen Battle, and it was while listening to one of them that I ran across this. Even though Christmas is only three days away,…
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There's nothing like watching a movie about contemporary young people to make me feel better about being old.
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…is a good movie, a classic of its kind. But I never did understand how the murderous couple thought they could get away with it, because the means by which it's done are so implausible. Also, it's hard for me to look at Fred MacMurray and not think of Flubber. I didn't know until today…
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American football, I mean. Really, it is. And in the New York Times. You don't have to know anything about football, just that Tim Tebow plays quarterback, which is the single most important position on a football team, that he was one of the top players in the country when he was in college but hasn't…
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The Waning of Adulthood This is a subject that comes to mind for me sometimes when I've been watching old, which is to say roughly pre-1960, movies or TV shows, or even listening to the classic American popular songs of the pre-rock-and-roll 20th century. To develop fully a thesis on this topic would require a…
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Weekend Music The past couple of weeks have seen the passing of these two musicians who did much to broaden the horizons of music lovers in the 1950s and 1960s. Even people who didn't care much for jazz owned The Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out. Everybody knows "Take Five" (actually written by Paul Desmond, the…
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Sometimes when one uses the word "inconceivable" that is exactly what one means.
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I had definitely mixed feelings about the Lord of the Rings movies. The last of those three was the subject of the very first Sunday Night Journal, back in 2004. Since then my view of them has grown more negative. I think my complaint that The films seem driven by a compulsion to overstate and overdo, to…
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So just watch.
Light On Dark Water 