Way back in my film school days, I had an interaction with a favorite cousin whom I had not seen in some time. This opportunity to reconnect saw our first interaction since I had been accepted as a film student, and so he asked me what basically everyone asks me right after I tell them I’m studying film, “So, like what’s your favorite movie, then?” When approached with this question, at least by associates who are not necessarily film buffs, my default response is usually something I know has been on Netflix in the last year. (Though if I had to pick an answer ... maybe Silver Linings Playbook .) I think this time I said James Cameron’s Titanic . He then had a sort of illuminated reaction and followed up with, “I see, so you like … old movies.” My response to this was something in the vein of, “Well, yes , but NOOOO …” Steven Spielberg being a 29-year-old on the set of Jaws In academic circles, t he demarcation between “c...
Though I think of myself as putting my heart and soul into this blog, I generally like to keep my offline persona mysterious. This is why I use a pen name and why you’ll never see a picture of my face on this page. But I’ll pull behind the curtain just a little today and share that … I attended my high school reunion not too long ago. I actually ended up attending this reunion twice simply because the first reunion, our “real reunion,” was planned at sort of the last minute and had rather sparse attendance. And so those of us who made it to that resolved to see if we couldn’t pull off something a little more robust, which we did some months later with much more success. And I honestly didn’t mind going twice over. I never actively put any distance between myself and my old pals, but I also never really made any effort to hold onto them after graduating beyond liking their posts on...