2017 to Date

I haven't updated in a while. Much to share.

First, Some Goodness In The World

One year after hitting our fundraising goal, I was able to present the first annual Kavi Shekhar Pandey Arts Writer Scholarship on April 23, at the Michigan Daily's annual commencement ceremony in Ann Arbor. Shekhar's family was there with me, and I gave a brief speech. 

You can read more about the event and scholarship efforts here. And, if you are feeling generous, you can donate here.

Sign O' The Times

I made my New York Times debut in two pieces for its streaming-guide website Watching. First, a rundown of every recent Best Documentary Oscar winner available online; and second, a guide to Arrival​.

IndieWire

During the month of March I served as a substitute daily news writer for IndieWire. This was not my first gig with the site, but it was my most extended period with them, and I produced several cool features, including:

• A look at the unfinished Orson Welles movie The Other Side of the Wind, which Netflix recently announced it would be restoring. Featuring interviews with Welles historians. (3/20/17)
• A feature on the smash podcast S-Town, wherein I interview series creator Brian Reed and producer Julie Snyder on how the project emerged from the This American Life hit factory. (3/28/17)
• A sit-down interview with Danny Boyle, who visited Chicago to discuss T2 Trainspotting and his upcoming TV project. (3/17/17)
• An interview with BBC documentarian Louis Theroux about My Scientology Movie and advice for other filmmakers looking to cover secretive organizations. (3/10/17)
• A look at the New Negress Film Society, a Brooklyn-based collective of black women filmmakers racking up big awards. (3/24/17)
• A behind-the-scenes tour of The A.V. Club, the new pop-culture show on Fusion aiming to replicate the success of the website on TV. (3/24/17)
• An advanced peek at the renovated Quad Cinema arthouse and repertory theater in New York. (4/12/17)

On the Radio

While I was at IndieWire, I wrote a piece (3/7/17) on the then-looming WGA negotiations and whether it seemed likely the writers would strike over a new contract. The disputes were resolved before a strike could happen. But in the interim I appeared on the March 13 episode of The Frame, an entertainment news program out of KPCC in Southern California, to discuss the story.

Into the Political Storm

Steve Bannon used to be a filmmaker, and two of the documentaries he executive-produced were made for public TV. One actually aired on PBS. When President Trump's federal budget request proposed to zero out all funding to public broadcasting, Current assigned me to investigate his chief strategist's public TV history and see how his past could connect to the White House's present. (4/19/17)

More Reviews

Catching up on the last five months of my film reviews for NPR. Surprisingly for the first leg of the year, there was quite a lot worth discussing:

• Violet: A Flemish BMX teen grapples with death in this uncompromising vision, which I first saw in Ghent in 2014. (5/11/17)
• Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2: No longer fresh, the sequel settles for a cool mixtape.  (5/4/17)
• Obit: A thoughtful documentary about the journalists who chronicle death for a living. I interviewed the director, Vanessa Gould, for Tribeca last year. (4/27/17)
• My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea: A snarky, back-of-the-class animated indie disaster movie. Giddy fun. (4/13/17) 
• Graduation: The new film from the Romanian cinema renaissance is a complex drama about a father's moral duty to family, self, and country. (4/6/17)
• The Zookeeper's Wife: It's yet another "Holocaust movie," this one starring Jessica Chastain - but this one creates some strange (likely unintentional) parallels between Jews and animals. (3/30/17)
• I, Olga: A chilling Czech bio-drama about a young woman who murdered civilians in a truck attack, released the same week as a similar attack unfolded in London. I also interviewed these directors, at Berlinale 2016. (3/23/17)
• Beauty and the Beast: I was not a fan of the latest Disney remake, which CGIs its way out of the source material and is more concerned with nostalgia than wonder. NPR readers were not happy with me. (3/16/17)
• The Last Word: Shirley MacLaine signs on for a round of pointless hero-worship as an unpleasant old woman who commissions her own obituary in advance. Rewatch The Apartment instead. (3/2/17)
• My Life as a Zucchini: A lovely French-Swiss stop-motion feature about a little kid making friends in a group foster home. I recommended parents bring their "smart kids," which did not sit well with the blog Acculturated. "Apparently, what passes for kids’ movies according to NPR and Hollywood’s elites now includes a steady diet of adult content such as murder-suicides, 'puppet nudity,' drugs, and child abuse," they wrote, angry that arthouse movies can't "let kids be kids." If only the world were that simple. (2/23/17)
• A Cure For Wellness: A modern take on the H.P. Lovecraft mad-doctor-in-a-castle horror tales. The atmosphere is stronger than the bloated story. (2/16/17)
• Fifty Shades Darker: It's not really a movie; more like Hollywood-sanctioned erotica. But I had to review it anyway. (2/9/17)
• I Am Not Your Negro: This propulsive documentary about James Baldwin's unfinished book arrived at precisely the moment we were most primed to hear his words again. (2/2/17)
• I Am Michael: A biopic about Michael Glatze, the gay activist turned fundamentalist preacher, that convincingly renders the ideological chasm he chose to cross. (1/26/17)
• The Founder: The all-American story of Ray Kroc, a man who poached a great idea and then became an insufferable rich asshole. I ate a McDonald's burger for the first time in a decade (a Royale with Cheese in Paris) for research. (1/19/17)
• A Monster Calls: Not just another teen tearjerker, this fantasy film about a beast who helps a young boy cope with his mother's cancer has a maturity and sophistication. (1/5/17)​

And one bonus one: the new xXx for Uproxx(xXxXx). (1/20/17)

On the TV side, I investigated Series 4 of Sherlock for Vulture.

• Episode 1: Fairly entertaining. (1/1/17)
• Episode 2: Fun enough. (1/8/17)
• Episode 3: Not good. (1/15/17)