Set deep in the midst of Amish Country in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania is a curious amusement-park like establishment, known as Camp Woodward. According to the 2010 census, the township of Woodward’s population: 110. The extreme sports complex comes to life in the summer months, hailing talented athletes from the Northeast and beyond year after year. A former dairy farm, the bones of giant, old farmhouses comprise many of the facilities that have since been converted into topiary masterpieces of rubber, leather, foam, and plywood. Picture this: after completing some form of stunt, an athlete looks out of the giant farmhouse…
A story
Ice crystals glistening resplendent canary hues reflecting the street lamps outside gently spotted Yasmine’s crossed legs. She was seated on a yoga mat so near to the glass curtain wall that the plaster on each side which met the glass was outside her field of vision. She felt suspended in air or even like a buddha levitating, seated in the soft center of a lotus flower. Toto, her corgi, brushed his long body against one of her legs, peeling the curtain back from her wintry reverie. His hair, she realized, was everywhere. She thought about the lengths she and the…
I wonder if President Obama would have signed into law the Visa Waiver Improvement Program and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act if he had witnessed anything marginally close to the domestic war on terror Americans faced over the past year. To look on the bright side of the capitol rioting and protesting, it has conceded a great deal of hope for immigration activist groups. The passage of the “No Ban Act” deems promising as it will be much harder for the Supreme Court this time around to permit blatant prejudice yielding public policy. I have faith that the officials in our…
During a poetry lesson held between two illicit lovers, John Keats and Fanny Brawne, Keats instructs Fanny: “A poem needs understanding through the senses; The point of diving into a lake is not to immediately swim to the shore but to swim in the lake. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”
And this is exactly what Jane Campion does; She dives headlong into this lake and doesn’t stop swimming until the very end, embracing the mystery of the love affair and life in early 19th century England all the way through. …
A tv miniseries adaptation of Celeste Ng’s second novel, “Little Fires Everywhere” (her first a novel called “Everything I Never Told You” which won the Amazon Book of the Year award in 2014) premiered on Hulu in March. You may be familiar with the title because it was a friend’s first recommended quarantine binge. But if you hit fast-forward and watched the miniseries first, trust me when I say that the book may just be a more rewarding investment of your time than the series. The series is entertaining, but the book will leave you with a newfound perspective on…
In 1925 Virginia Woolf’s modernist classic Mrs. Dalloway was published in London, after which the field of literature, and the understanding of modern subjecthood, would never be the same. At its core the novel is a study of life after the First World War and what it meant to live on after such an influx of not only physical destruction, taking the shape of lives and property lost in the war, but also the death of the past and its traditions. It is a work that occurs in the liminal space between a past of drawing rooms and privately organized…
Jules was at the hospice with Mrs. Grey, an elderly woman suffering from terminal sarcoma, a rare form of heart cancer. She felt a filial affinity for Mrs. Grey; It was a fondness that caught her by surprise one visit over a cup of tea. The old, keen woman, blind in one eye, had reached over more than an arm’s length to the tray from which Jules was preparing the cups, and gracefully snatched the paper tags, pulling each tea bag out of its respective mug. Her usual polite and reticent nature was intercepted by an abruptness that startled Jules…
Oliver Assayas, the French director who once wrote alongside the likes of Jean-Luc Godard for the Cahiers du Cinema magazine, was certainly ambitious to take on adapting the book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War for the screen. It is a complicated story of the lives of the Wasp network: a group of five Cuban men who were sent by the Cuban government to acquire secret information about Anti-Castroist terrorist groups residing in parts of Florida in the early ’90s. At its most interesting, Wasp Network is a critique of the American justice system.
Rene Gonzales (Edgar Ramirez) is…
Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma Reaffirms the Power of the Melodrama
There are many reasons Alfonso Cuaron took home the award for Best Director last February at the Academy Awards: one of these is his appropriation of the melodramatic mode. With Roma, Cuaron proves that the melodrama, having been critiqued extensively in the past for being overly sentimental and thus lacking in social acuteness, is a genre that in fact can be both sensational and real.
Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, which he both directed and edited, demonstrates both an intimate and far-reaching exemplar of converging social forces during the Mexican Dirty War. In the face of civil and moral strife, the main…
People fled to see Todd Phillips’s Joker, which was released on October 4, to better understand the Batman supervillain apart from his other numerous appearances, including Jack Nicholson’s version in Batman and Heath Ledger’s portrayal in The Dark Knight. People were expecting this origin story to have all or at least some of the answers- a diagnostic of sorts explaining why he is the way he is. After having been dazzled by the surprising ’70s inspired theatrical mise en scene but then steadily disenchanted by the lack of a coherent and interesting storyline, I turned to a piece by the…
Joy Loftus
I capture emotions, translate them into mental images, and package them into cinematic scenes. I also write fiction, essays, and other things.
