At my high school, admission to advanced placement (AP) classes was by invitation only. I tried four times to be admitted into AP English. The head of the department, a sour and exhausted woman named Ms. Gallagher, eventually told me, “I wouldn’t feel good about myself if I encouraged you to pursue something at which you won’t succeed.” […]
I fell in love with Last Tango in Paris in the summer of 1973 when I was 20 years old. But now, decades later, I’m sorry to say I’ve fallen out of love with the film much as one eventually discovers that Old Spice aftershave (and the guy who wore it) wasn’t that cool after all. […]
I grew up at the movies. I lived in a neighborhood where most of the children were younger than I was, and therefore I had few friends my own age. I spent my time reading and going to the movies. These pursuits were my companions. […]
One afternoon, they showed Maya Deren’s ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ (1943), and it amazed me! It’s a short film directed by wife-and-husband team Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. […]
Nineteen eighty-six was a particularly good movie year for me. I worked in a video store after school and on weekends, so I saw a lot them — especially horror films; the more outrageous the better. […]
As a seven-year-old living in the jungles of Matute, Colombia, I was surrounded by an exotic land. My pets weren’t limited to the three dogs and six cats that roamed but also included a macaw named Ludwina, a howler monkey named Tarzan, several tortoises and an assortment of parrots and parakeets. […]
October 1978. A weekday afternoon in Manhattan. I stumble into daylight, having just experienced something which has so floored me that I’m numb, twisted around, and can’t remember which subway takes me back downtown — so I start walking, trying to make sense of what I’d just seen. […]
There was a time, in the 1980s in San Diego, when there weren’t any theatres that showed foreign, independent or avant-garde films except for one place: the Unicorn Theatre. […]
I grew up in Deep River in Northern Ontario, Canada in the 1970s, an idyllic place to live as far as catching frogs and running through the woods, but I didn’t get to see movies in the cinema very often. […]
When Sofia Coppola’s ‘Somewhere’ was released, I was out of town, and I knew I’d rush to see it the moment I got back home. But by then, it was playing only at the Summerfield Theatre in Santa Rosa, about two-and-a-half hours from where I lived in Santa Cruz. […]
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