Sonic Cinema

One of the first long-form reviews I sent to friends and family in the email list that would become Sonic Cinema was for Stanley Kubrick’s final film, “Eyes Wide Shut”. Along with “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace”, it was the most anticipated film of the summer of 1999, even before Kubrick’s untimely passing shortly after presenting his final cut to Warner Bros in early March of that year. Production had […]

Typically with this section of my retrospective, I’ve tried to reflect on what the year gave us, and what it means for Hollywood moving forward. This year, I’m going to go in a different direction, and look at some of the people we lost over the year. I’ll never forget the first time I watched a David Lynch film. It was 1997’s “Lost Highway”, and boy was I not prepared […]

This is less a discussion about movies as it is a commentary on moviegoing in general. One of the most common complaints I’ve seen about why people don’t go to movies nowadays is constant disruptions during movies. In all honesty, that was the case before COVID, but it’s only accelerated in the age of streaming. Joining me in the discussion is film critic Austin Belzer, and we share stories of […]

We are taking a break from one series to return to another. It’s been a few years, but my “Established Classics” series is back. For those who may not remember, this is a series where we look at movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age- from the late ’30s to 1960- and look at whether they hold up now, and why they do. Returning is actor Timothy J. Cox, and after we […]

I need to get this series back on track. When I changed up this series in 2020, I was not anticipating the pandemic, and not working for most of the year. Now that I have changed jobs, I’m finding maintaining two movies a month to be a tricky business. Part of that is because of how varied my work schedule can be, but it’s also because I find myself working […]

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 […]

Every October since 2002, I’ve spent the month delving into horror films. Some years have leaned more into familiar choices that I have come to love over the years, often by virtue of what else I had going on that month. In its earlier incarnations, however, I leaned into films I was not familiar with in the genre, from classic offerings to modern movies I’ve missed. Each year, I find […]

When I first scored “The Case” short films for my friend, Chris Dufresne, I had one keyboard synthesizer, and no recording software with which to truly sync picture and music. That meant figuring out the timings for each cue by figuring out where music should be, when it should change, and basically hoping it would work out. It did, and I’m still quite pleased with those musical efforts. “Player, PhD.” […]