Sonic Cinema

This past March, I was accepted to be a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle, which was founded in 2017, and looks to “fill a void in the local film community and in the representation of Atlanta’s media on the national stage.” This marks my second local film critic group to be included in, after the Georgia Film Critics Association (which I’ve been a member of since 2018). In […]

I’m not going to write this from a perspective of trying to understand what a lot of women, LGBTQIA+ and minorities are thinking in the aftermath of the United States electing Donald Trump as President for the second time in eight years. This is only my perspective, my feelings, expressed in a medium that I express myself best at. Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning, was anxious for me. I was […]

We wrap up the Sonic Cinema Podcast for 2024 with an episode that I’ve had on the brain for a couple of years. The topic is Christmas movies, and the mainline between the two is director Bob Clark, who in 1974 directed the slasher classic, “Black Christmas”, and a decade later, directed the beloved “A Christmas Story”. My guest is once again Phil Fasso, and we had an enjoyable discussion […]

Hello readers and listeners! We’re wrapping up 2024 with a handful of “Class of 1999” discussions, and this is one I’m delighted to share with you. The film is John Lasseter’s “Toy Story 2”, and joining me is returning guest Darin Lundberg of NostalgiaCast. This was such a wonderful dialogue and experience. You can hear the Yahoos With a Microphone commentary on “Toy Story” here. I hope you enjoy! “Class […]

If you love film, you likely have been to a repertory screening at some point in your life. The chance to watch an older movie, on the big screen, with a crowd as in love with the opportunity to watch a movie in theatres, maybe for the first time, or maybe to recapture that sense of wonder of when you first saw it. The idea of repertory showings of movies […]

This is the fourth year of “Repertory Revues,” and the 15th year since I started to watch older films over the month in an attempt to both broaden my cinematic horizons, as well as rewatching older favorites I wanted to write about, and it’s been increasingly difficult to keep up in the way I originally intended when I started in 2009. This year, I made a fairly big dent in […]

One of my favorite things in movies is when they show why a piece of music matters to a character. While a great soundtrack can help us figure out who a character is, when we see characters actively engage with music onscreen, that is a special thing for me. There are plenty of great examples of this- Max Cherry discovering The Delfonics in “Jackie Brown”; “As Time Goes By” being […]

**Author’s Note: The following essay includes scenes from “Touch of Evil” to illustrate my words. These scenes not only include spoilers to the film, but one involves implied sexual assault. Orson Welles never stopped pushing cinema form forward after “Citizen Kane”– the problem was his resources got more and more scant, and his freedom more and more bowled over by studio interference as he went along. But watch films like […]