Another (two) weeks, another Five Cool Things. This time I’m talking about Twin Peaks, Yellowjackets, Hannibal, Dark Winds, The French Connection and Carrie Coon visiting the Criterion Closet.
You can read all my thoughts on these things and more by clicking here.
It is time for another five things. This time I’m talking about Porco Rosso, the animated film from Studio Ghibli, a wonderful episode of The Last of Us, Taskmaster my new favorite British Panel Show, a silly 1980s horror film called Trick or Treat, and one of my favorite 1980s movies, Heathers, which I shared with my daughter. Plus R.E.M. got back together for a single song with Michael Shannon. You can read all about it here.
Speaking of Five Cool Things here is this week’s article. This time I’m talking about Ludwig, a delightful detective procedural custom-made for David Mitchell, Conclave a very good drama about electing the Pope, The Gone a mystery from Australia, Jackson Browne singing “These Days,” The Substance and Black Bag an upcoming movie from Steven Soderberg.
I wanted the sixth cool thing to be that picture of Bob Weir and Taylor Swift at the Grammys that’s been circulating around, but I couldn’t afford the rights to it. I wonder what those two people talked about. Do you think Taylor learned some improvisational tips from Bob? Will she start performing a fifteen-minute version of “Cruel Summer?” Will Bob start wearing a onesie on stage?
Alas, we shall never know. But since I couldn’t talk about that I instead talked about a couple of movies (Lost Highway, Marty) and a few TV shows (Would I Lie To You, Arcane & The Long Shadow) and finished it off with a dumb-looking trailer for yet another attempt at a Fantastic Four movie. You can read it all right here.
I think I’m going to go through all my Five Cool Things articles that I wrote for Cinema Sentries and post them here. I’ll do it in chronological order starting with the oldest.
I’m going to enjoy re-reading them and seeing how this series develops. For this one, my second ever to write, I talk a bit about how I came up with the idea and the name for the series. For the “And…” part I just used a picture of Moe Howard. I guess it took me a little while to actually start writing something about the sixth thing instead of just being silly.
I also write about Superman, Hell or High Water, Singing in the Rain, The Grateful Dead and Dumbo.
You can read it all here.
I thought I had previously posted a bunch of my Five Cool Things articles, but it appears that is not true. So, I thought I’d return to the beginning and post the first one I wrote. Before I started writing these articles for Cinema Sentries I had a separate blog where I was writing about the things I was enjoying every day.
It was just for fun, like I said earlier it was a way of bringing a little joy into a dark world. I did it enough that I wanted to bring it to a larger audience, hence Cinema Sentries. The owner of the site liked the idea but we struggled with a title for it. I knew I wanted to do more than just one cool thing per article and somehow we landed on five things and then we added the “And…”. As a joke my friend decided the first article should be And…a Larch (don’t ask me why.)
And here we are. It is fun reading these old articles and see the things I was enjoying back then. This first one was written in January of 2017. That seems a lifetime ago. You can check it out here.
I used to write an article for Cinema Sentries entitled “Five Cool Things And…” the “And” being a sixth cool thing that worked as a way of making the title unique and usually highlighting something current (whereas many of the other things were rather old.).
I took what I thought was going to be a short break during the Pandemic. Nearly four years later I’m finally writing it again.
The basic idea is to highlight interesting and fun (and cool) things I’ve consumed over the last couple of weeks. I like the idea of sharing a little joy in these dark times.
My first one just landed and you can read it here.
themidnightcafe.org 