— by WILLIAM STERR — What if your father, with the aim of protecting you, went out one night, and came back the next night as a monster – the very thing he tried to protect you from? A. K. Tolstoy, older second cousin to the more famous Leo Tolstoy, was a literary giant of […][...]
Review: Broken Wings
— by BEV QUESTAD — Hot Springs is just a normal little town in Arkansas. Jayne’s house perches right on the town highway in a two-story faux antebellum home with porch and rafters from which she can hang her wooden vulture cut-outs. She is famous in town for rescuing an injured vulture with only one […][...]
Review: MAU
— by WILLIAM STERR — “Think about the number of times you can close your eyes and open them in a space where you only see the natural world; and you realize that it’s almost never; it’s almost zero. That what you’re experiencing, your life is a designed life. And the beauty of that is […][...]
Review: Happening
— by BEV QUESTAD — In college, back in the ’60s, a friend attending school on a complete scholarship got pregnant. She heard of a place she could go to in another state. Friends pooled available cash, someone had a car, and she was back two days later, white, gaunt and weak. It turned out […][...]
Review: Big vs. Small
— by BEV QUESTAD — The tallest waves in the world are found in Nazaré, Portugal. The biggest wave ever recorded there was 80 feet tall. One of the smallest surfers, at 5-foot-1, is determined to conquer both these mega waves and her own demons. Haunting music with a sitar-like sound lures you in as […][...]
Review: The Ants and the Grasshopper
— by WILLIAM STERR — “The Ants and the Grasshopper” is a documentary that will appear at the “EarthX Film Festival in mid-May in Dallas, Texas. The festival’s mission is to “bring awareness of the environmental crisis in order to create sincere action on both an individual and communal scale; to inspire local and global […][...]
Review: A Thousand Little Cuts
— by WILLIAM STERR — This is a disturbing movie. A movie that is difficult to watch. It is also a movie that deals with a very difficult subject – one that we as a society need to be reminded of again and again and again. The film opens with a woman jogging. She jogs […][...]
Review: Box of Rain
— by BEV QUESTAD — It’s 1985 and Lonnie Frazier is a very pretty high school girl. She goes out in a car with boys she’s known since grade school. Then something goes haywire. This one incident, though a hyper-example, is a core metaphor for the betrayal one can experience in formative years. We were […][...]
Review: The Will to See
— by BEV QUESTAD — The film begins with a quiet pan of New York City and Central Park while a French voice-over intones, “This is where it all began. I am in New York City to defend the Kurdish cause and I receive a message from a stranger alerting me to the plight of […][...]
Review: Black Box
— by WILLIAM STERR — You are on European Airlines Flight 24, from Dubai to Paris, just flying into French airspace. It’s 7:24 a.m. and breakfast is being served in all classes. You ask for coffee. Then any flyer’s nightmare begins. The plane begins to descend, rapidly. This is what you experience via “point- of […][...]