Posts tagged as "review" - Chris Hardie

I attended my first film festival ever this past weekend in Madison, Wisconsin. As someone who generally enjoys movies and sees the art as an important cultural phenomenon (not to mention being interested in writing and making them myself), it was a real treat to participate in an event that is shaped entirely around that phenomenon and the people who love movies. Though I'm sure we didn't take on as much of a hard-core schedule as many others there, we got to see a nice mix of films: from feature-length...

After seeing Bill Murray on Letterman last week and remembering how much I enjoyed Lost in Translation, I was excited to see his new flick, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which came out this week. I went with my mom and sister in Chicago, which tends to be a better movie-watching experience for me than in Richmond, where the, um, conventions regarding sound levels and distractions during a public movie seem to follow the looser "enjoy it like it's your own living room" standard. But this...

I'm having a really great time right now reading/listening to Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything. The book itself is very intriguing - a lively and engaging narrative of how our universe came to be and where it is now, the sciences and people who have explored those questions for so long, and the amazing oddities and subtleties about how our world works. It's a little geeky, but definitely written for non-geeks who want the Big Picture in the biggest sense of the word. But...

I'd like to sing the praises of artist Vienna Teng. Not only is her music outstanding (more on that in a moment), but her story is quite interesting as well, at least to me. Teng studied Computer Science at Stanford University, and then worked as a software engineer at Cisco Systems in San Francisco. As a fellow geek, I have to admire that part alone. But then Teng quit her tech job to prepare for the independent release of her debut album, Waking Hour, which is a really wonderful mix of striking...

I saw the movie Phone Booth over the holiday weekend; I commend it to you, though less so for the movie itself than for the central question that it finds such a creative way to ask: When you're all alone at the edge of your life, with nothing much to lose, what are the things about your life that need to be reconciled, the ghosts of your your past and present that need to be called by name? When Stu, the central character in the movie, was asked this question, he didn't have any particularly...

This analysis necessarily discusses some plot and thematic details of the book After Dachau by Daniel Quinn. I have made every attempt to refrain from revealing too much or spoiling the experience of reading the book for the first time, but picky readers be warned. After reading just the first sentence of After Dachau, I was sure I had identified the major themes, direction, and message-delivering vehicle that Daniel Quinn would use in his new book. This was slightly comforting; I'd read that...