CONTENTS



WORK


SCIENCE AND MEDICINE


POLITICS


RELIGION


TRUE STORIES


MADE UP STORIES


FOOD and food


FILM

IN THEATERS

Quantum of Solace
Synecdoche, New York
Trouble the Water
The Secret Life of Bees
Rachel Getting Married
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Blindness
Chris & Don: A Love Story
Up the Yangtze
Tell No One
X-Files: I Want to Believe
The Dark Knight
Hancock
Mister Lonely
Wanted
The Children of Huang Shi


AT HOME

Wall-E
The Edukators
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
The Kiss of the Spider Woman
The Boys in the Band
The Visitor
The Happening
Iron Man
The Fall
Married Life
Then She Found Me
Redbelt
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Smart People
Doomsday
Shutter
The Bank Job
Stop-Loss
The Ruins
Vantage Point
In Bruges
Under the Same Moon
Jumper
Funny Games
Cassandra's Dream
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Untraceable
I'm Not There
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Charlie Wilson's War
The Golden Compass
The Orphanage
One Missed Call
The Savages
Cloverfield
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Juno
Lions for Lambs
There Will Be Blood
Enchanted
Love In the Time of Cholera
I Am Legend
August Rush
Atonement
Hitman
Dan In Real Life
Things We Lost In The Fire
No Country for Old Men
Margot at the Wedding
American Gangster
Michael Clayton
In The Valley of Elah


JOHNWSTILES


Essays

In the Dark 10.02.08

It has been almost eight years since I've written a work story. I've been with the same outfit for those eight years and I decided not to make any co-workers mad. Standing by that choice, I will share the work perspective of our recent Hurricane. Here is the summary I provided to... more

Food, How Did We Get Here?

There isn't enough food or water to go around and they'll be ten billion of us in fifty years. more


Films In Current Release

Quantum of Solace 11.14.08ticketticket

Either this is what happens when one ages or this is a profoundly flawed film. I often have trouble understanding dialogue these days. Thanks to the digital recording device on the television I can up the volume and replay until I either get it or tire of the effort. I do it often enough that I think to it in the movie theater, even the concert hall. Occasionally I imagine using it in dinner conversation...more


Synecdoche, New York 11.07.08 ticket ticket

Gifted writer of screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal SUnshine of the Spotless Mind sits in the directors chair for Synecdoche, New York. Charlie Kaufman irregular mind produces yet another strange story of a small scale theater director suddenly endowed with a genius grant. Freed of the mundane limitations imposed by budget and timelines ...more


Trouble the Water 11.07.08 ticket ticket ticket

Surely one of the great ironies of my lifetime will be the election of a black man to the presidency within three years of the time we allowed a major American city and its black population to drown. Countless millions of us watched in horror as our desperate fellow citizens waved banners from rooftops and highway overpasses begging to be saved. Ordinarily cool media anchors broke down on camera or lost control talking to the distant authorities as they listened too long to the insistence that everything that could be done was...more


Secret Life of Bees 10.26.08 ticket ticket

I wonder what it means that I remember so few books. I watched a scene from Atonement the other day and was particularly taken by the blocking in the scene where Robbie confronts Briony and Cecilia acts to keep Robbie from striking her sister. I was watching because I had come upon it near the end and couldn't remember the vehicle employed to reveal the awful truth of Robbie and Cecilia's fate. I couldn't remember reading the book at all but I'm told I did. Interesting how much of one's consciousness can be transferred...more


Rachel Getting Married 10.18.08 ticket ticket ticket

Anne Hathaway charmed us in The Princess Diaries, worried us when she signed on for its sequel, gave us a hint of her depth in Brokeback Mountain, held her own with Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada and assumes her position in the first tier with her portrayal of a dark and desperate Kym in Rachel Getting Married. I just sat back down after turning down the...more


Vicky Cristina Barcelona 10.11.08 ticket ticket

I hate feeling stupid. Especially at the hands of someone who I fear thinks we are all stupid. Just so you won't - Vicky is Rebecca Hall, Cristina is Scarlett Johansson and Barcelona is one of the coolest looking cities on the planet what with all its Goudy architecture. I thought the whole title was someone's name...

Patricia Clarkson (unforgettable in Pieces of April) and Javier Bardem (as a hedonistic artist ...more


Blindness 10.08.08 ticketticket

I think I've always thought we would be better off with women in charge. Women have so much more sense, so much less blind bravado. But patriarchal we are and patriarchal we will likely remain. Not because the latest two samples of women as leaders are so ...more



Films On DVD

Hellboy II: The Golden Army 07.14.08 ticket ticket ticket

During the summer of my sixth year I awoke half a dozen times in the middle of the night with a fever of 104 or so. The doctor, also awakened in the middle of the night, had my parents pull out all the stops to get the fever down. Pneumonia would be preferable, they were told, so I was dipped into an ice bath. Twenty years later I read a Time Magazine article associating earlier than actuarial death... more


The Boys in the Bandticketticketticket

AI was warned about this film. It was released almost forty years ago, 1970 to be exact. Hmm, 1970 - The Beatles released Let It be, Simon and Garfunkel gave us A Bridge Over Troubled Waters, Diana Ross claimed Ain't No Mountain High Enough, and The Kinks let us in on Lola's secret. Hollywood gave us Patton, Love Story, Five Easy Pieces, M*A*S*H, Women in Love... more


Kiss of the Spider Woman ticketticket ticket

Argentine director Hector Babenco spends two years begging his fellow countryman and author Manuel Puig to sell him the rights to his cult novel, Beijo da Mulher Aranha. Puig, wanting an international production and not Babenco's planned Brazilian feature, won't budge until he learns Burt Lancaster, fresh off his "comeback" in 1980's Atlantic City, wants in. Lancaster has no patience for Leonard Schrader's glacial pace in penning the screenplay and begins his own version.... more


The Visitor 05.31.08ticketticketticket

A friend asked me a couple of weeks ago if I'd seen The Visitor. No, I said, it looks schmaltzy. Wrong again. The Visitor tells two stories. One is about losing touch with that which made our country what it used to be. Immigrants. The other is about losing touch with our heart.
When we suffer great pain we make choices in how we cope. Choices made without thinking. Choices that usually end up hurting us... more


The Fall 06.09.08ticketticket

A Russian remake of the 1981 Bulgarian original Yo Ho Ho. A fairy tale. The Russian remake is set in 1920's Los Angeles where Roy and Alexandria have landed after falling. She from a tree picking fruit... more


Married Life 04.26.08 ticketticket ticket

Clothes were much cooler then. Skinny belts over pleated wool slacks. Polyester was still around the corner. People smoked without shame and drank whiskey like water. Drugstores sold all sorts of awful stuff over the counter and you could tell cars apart. It was that short time frame after we conquered evil and before we... more


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