Born in 1931, Nawal El-Saadawi has lived the type of multifaceted life that seems unreal. In 1955, she graduated the University of Cairo Medical School, specializing in psychiatry. Three years later, she wrote Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. During the 1960s and the early 1970s, she worked in public service as the Director of...
When I heard that filmmakers were remaking 1977’s Suspiria, I suffered two conflicting reactions. Hell no! I thought. Don’t touch this cult favorite! Don’t ruin it with your Hollywood sensibilities. But at the same time, I thought: It’ll be interesting to see what they do. To call a film a cult favorite is to...
When I left the theater after seeing On the Basis of Sex, my first thought was, “That sets the bar high.” After Escape Room, it was the second movie I saw in 2019, but it wouldn’t surprise me if, come the end of 2019, I consider it the best movie of the year. Nor...
During the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, every supermarket began offering generic food items. They were cheaper than brandnames and helped family budgets make it from one payday to the next. They were packaged in pure white containers with large black letters telling the shoppers what’s contained inside. A can of peas would read...
Everyone, at least every book lover, has their favorite bookstore. Though mine is Auntie’s Books in Spokane, many others living in the Northwest tell me theirs is Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon. All my life I’ve been hearing about Powell’s, but I never visited, until a few years ago, when I took...
One weakness I have as a movie review is that I often find I have two opinions of a movie. There is the opinion I have as I’m watching the movie, and there’s the opinion I have after seeing the movie, as it sinks in, and as I form my critical analyze of it. These...
Though The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the first novel by Neil Gaiman that I’ve read, I wasn’t as unfamiliar with his work as I had believed when I read it. With Roger Avary he wrote the screenplay for Beowulf (2007), directed by Robert Zemeckis. He also wrote the novel Stardust...
When I first heard about a movie based on the premise that future cities will be giant, mobile war machines, my first reaction was indifference. The concept sounded like a challenge to my willing suspension of disbelief, that psychological trick we play in order to enjoy novels, short stories, movies, and other works of...
As the title suggests, The Possession of Hannah Grace is about demonic possession, but its plot is better described as a ghost story. Yet it includes vampiric elements. The hybrid nature of the monster suggests to me that it started life as three screenplays that were merged into one. Though such things happen in...
When I travel, I take the train. A few days before Halloween, I found myself at an Amtrak Depot that offered a book exchange. Leave a book; take a book. They had a jar for donations to the staff’s holiday party. Though the selection wasn’t large, it included Gary Brandner’s The Howling. This werewolf...
