Catching Up on Best Picture: The Battle of the Myths

The Best Pictures Oscar contest: a horse race with no transparent handicapping. But this year the specter of Joseph Campbell will be in the Kodak auditorium because three films have unusually intersecting mythologies. Myth #1: American View of the Mystique of Paris From the first whiny...

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 Mapeel     2/25/2012     Film   

The Accidental Pilgrim: Thoughts for Ash Wednesday During Oscars Week

Thinking about The Tree of Life and The Way reminded me that I stumbled very unintentionally upon two pilgrimage sites when I was traveling for other purposes. I thought of myself as an Accidental Pilgrim, a twist on The Accidental Tourist, the novel by Anne Tyler and movie staring William Hurt from...

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 Mapeel     2/22/2012     Film, Travel   

Oscars Catch-Up: The Tree of Life via The Way

  I saw Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, nominated for Best Picture, a few months ago, and I wasn’t pulled in. I thought maybe my lyric mojo was on the fritz, so I took the “opportunity” of 2 weeks of resting with the flu to watch it on pay-per-view. I had noticed that the Emilio Estevez/Martin...

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 Mapeel     2/18/2012   

The Red & the Green

  February and March are the calendar’s red and green months. I don’t mind this annual pop culture color coding. For Valentine’s Day, pop culture literally put it on the map, long before Victorian England and then Hallmark cashed in on it. Chaucer has the earliest citation, 1382,...

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 Mapeel     2/12/2012