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 […]

Sometimes, the best laid plans can go awry. Even when it’s continuing a project you’ve been working on for years. When I choose a “bookend” filmmaker for the year, the expectation I hold for myself is that I will watch one of their films every year after their initial inclusion as a bookend, thereby making their filmography an imperative one for me to go through. This year, if you looked […]

To paraphrase one of the film’s I reviewed in this space in 2020, I picked a Hell of a year to stop reviewing older films once a week. It makes all the sense in the world that, in a year where I resolved to review fewer older movies a month than I had under the “A Movie a Week” banner, we would be thrown into a global pandemic that would […]

My desire to write music for film predates me even putting pencil to manuscript paper for the first time. Even though I had been listening to film soundtracks and scores for years, it’s hard to describe the impact of what James Horner’s score for “Braveheart” did to me. For the first time, I went from appreciating the impact of a great soundtrack to thinking, “What if I was responsible for […]

There’s rock-n-roll excess, and then there’s Guns N’ Roses. My first experience with GN’R was the single for “Paradise City” in 1988-89. It had, as a B-side, “Move to the City” from “GN’R Lies,” and it was in rotation for me as I went through middle school, and started to form my identity in terms of the music I liked. Until I became a soundtrack junkie in 1993, I never […]