Activity

Twice each month on Friday nights, the leaflet said, the Harmony Center for the Joyful Spirit hosts movies at the “Home of Gwendolyn and Daniel.” The mission of Oakland’s Harmony Center is to bring “Joy and Inspiration into our lives.” “What better way to do that than to get together with friendly …

Reader, it was not to be. Right when I got into town a headline blared at me from a newspaper box on a street corner. “Alameda Labor Dispute Hinges on Skills of Projectionists,” read the front page of the East Bay Express, the area’s alt-weekly. The projectionists at the Alameda Theatre were on str…

I saw the documentary The War Tapes on DVD and made the mistake of watching the bonus features first. One of the bonus features turned out to be résumés for director Deborah Scranton and producer Chuck Lacy. Scranton is a former director of network-TV sports who graduated from Brown with a degree i…

Yet since it doesn’t quite know what it wants to say, this salutary didacticism is really a lost cause.

United 93 is an exploitation film in the form of a safety-instruction manual. It manipulates us mercilessly but blandly. When Flight 93 crashes the screen cuts to black. The only decent thing to do at that point would have been to end the film right there and flip on the lights in the theater. But …