CinemaDope: Right to Life
Autumn in New England is scarf season, and, like most people, I’ve built up a collection over the years. Most of them, to be honest, I don’t remember buying—they were probably gifts, or maybe left...
View ArticleCinemaDope: Order Up
At first glance, it sounds like the thin plot of a particularly bad example of a straight-to-DVD exploitation flick: a young woman is held against her will at her workplace, stripped naked, and forced...
View ArticleCinemaDope: Identity Crisis
A s I write this column, Hurricane Sandy is just beginning to beat down upon our shores. Friends in Northampton and Brooklyn alike have trees down in their yards; relatives in Rhode Island are dealing...
View ArticleSound and Fury
Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky is considered a classic on two counts. Based on a famous 13th-century victory when underdog Russian soldiers beat back an invading army, and reflecting...
View ArticleCinemaDope: Cello and Goodbye
I n my life away from writing, I’m a musician. And over the years, as I’ve gone from being a Dylan-ripoff to a Tom Waits wannabe, I’ve always been surprised at just how many of my fellow musicians...
View ArticleTurkey Season
The holiday season is officially scratching at our door: this column will hit the streets just as Thanksgiving begins, and from there the last five weeks of the year will go by in an eggnog-soaked...
View ArticleCinemaDope: In Love and War
F amily is a strange thing. Until we begin to build our own brood—and sometimes after that—there is rarely anyone who knows us as well as our parents do, however we might try to keep them distanced...
View ArticleCinemaDope: Parting Gifts
V eterans of the Valley film scene might remember the day when Pleasant Street Theater went dark—not the day this past June, but the one a few years ago, when the theater shut down for a month or so...
View ArticleCinemaDope: Getting Hitched
I n the history of film, the introduction of sound must reign as the biggest turning point. Much as the microphone gave us the breathy crooning of Bing and Sinatra instead of the bombast of their...
View ArticleCinemaDope: Holidays on Ice
B y the time this installment of CinemaDope hits the newsstands, many of you will be too busy to read it. You’ll already be packing up for an annual trip to visit family, or frantically cleaning the...
View ArticleCinemaDope: Dropping the Ball
W hen it comes to holidays, New Year’s has always gotten short shrift. It’s stuck in the aftermath of Christmas; by the time the ball drops (or rises, if you live in certain self-conscious Western...
View ArticleCinemaDope: Sing, Sing
I f you only know of David Chase through his most famous work—he was the driving force behind the HBO juggernaut and cultural phenomenon that was The Sopranos —you might be surprised to learn that he...
View ArticleArt in Paradise: Detroit, Lodz, Holyoke
A weird disorientation kicks in when you first watch After the Factory . Scenes of abandoned industrial buildings march by in quick succession, and, if you’ve spent much time in Easthampton or...
View ArticleCinemaDope: New Year, Old Films
A few weeks back, CinemaDope covered the Valley opening of Sascha Gervasi’s new film Hitchcock . That film, starring Anthony Hopkins as the iconic director and Helen Mirren as his wife and creative...
View ArticleCinemadope: The Seven Year Itch
A s a medium, film is something of a paradox. Few other art forms have the immediacy of film—watching ourselves, or versions of ourselves, captured in motion has a mysteriously strong impact on us as...
View ArticleCinemaDope: Cringe And Bear It
I n film circles, it’s become something of an accepted truth that Ed Wood made some of the world’s best “so bad they’re good” movies. His low-budget fare was made with an imaginative if sometimes...
View ArticleCinemaDope: Road Movie
I must have been insufferable as a teenager. Bookish from the get-go, I grew up spending a lot of time in my own head, dreaming of the past. I took up smoking and started collecting typewriters,...
View ArticleCinemaDope: Nine Lives
T his time of year is a real boon for fans of moviegoing. These are the people who enjoy going out to the movies almost as much as they enjoy the film itself—you can recognize them by their familiar...
View ArticleCinemaDope: Going Native
Even for longtime locals, organizations like the Northampton Arts Council can be easy to overlook. Those of us lucky enough to live in “artsy” towns find ourselves surrounded by a seemingly endless...
View ArticleCinemaDope: French Connection
N ot long after the Academy Award nominees were announced last month, some Internet wag opened a copy of Photoshop and got busy on a batch of fake movie posters. The result—circulated under titles...
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