The Friday 7/2/2021

No piece from me this week for the Scarecrow blog. It’s a holiday, you know.

But I have a new “Music and the Movies” radio episode to post. The latest one is called “2001: A Soundtrack Odyssey,” in which we look at the music of films released in the year 2001. Big movies, small movies, cult pictures, all combining for a certain ominous feeling – a tone set by Mulholland Drive, seen above.

The previous episode, on Bernard Herrmann’s fantasy films, remains online for a few more days.

I’m back for a two-year term on the Speakers Bureau at Humanities Washington, which sends people out to various parts of our state to talk. (At first we’ll be Zooming it.) My talk is called “This Is the End: How Movies Prepared Us for the Apocalypse,” where I explore – from the perspective of mankind’s response to the pandemic – how movies gave us the tools to deal, if only we’d been listening. Check out the description here, and if you live somewhere in Washington and are interested in hosting the talk, get in touch.

And three vintage reviews posted to What a Feeling!, my 1980s website, to wit: Alan J. Pakula’s See You in the Morning, a second-marriage film with Jeff Bridges and Alice Krige; Steven Kampmann and Will Aldis’s Stealing Home, a drama with Mark Harmon and Jodie Foster; and Woody Allen’s September, one of the serious ones, and a movie that the Woodman shot twice, with an almost entirely different cast the second time.