Films and Feelings

    I'll forgive you if you forgot this movie was coming. After shelving this project some two years ago, Warner Bros. has remained awfully mum about when we could expect to see Salem's Lot , only to decide to drop it on MAX with little more than two weeks of preparation, a bewildering practice that perhaps says more about the state of Hollywood at present than the content of the film itself.  But that's not the ravenous evil that we're here to discuss today.      In Gary Dauberman's adaptation of the famous Stephen King book, author Benjamin Mears returns to his childhood home of Jerusalem's Lot, or "Salem's Lot" to the locals, imagining that it might help spark an idea for a new book. How was he supposed to know that his hometown chose this of all days to start playing host to an ancient evil, one bent on spreading its illness into every home? Overnight, Salem's Lot is in the grip of darkness, and only Ben and a paltry group of makeshift vamp...

      Way, way back (about this time last year), I premiered my piece on the responsibility that younger viewers have to engage with older cinema --specifically the films of old Hollywood. There was a lot of ground that I wanted to cover in that essay--literally an entire era of filmmaking--so most of my talking points had to be concise, which is not how most writers prefer to discuss a thing for which they have passion enough to design and maintain their own blog. There is a bounty of discussion when it comes to film history and the people who made it.     Today I'd like to take the opportunity to dig a little deeper into one such island: that of legendary actor and trailblazer, Sidney Poitier.      Dwandalyn Reece, curator of the performing arts at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, described Poitier , “He fully inhabits both sides of that personality, or those tensions, of being a Black person i...