Words Seem Out Of Place

Revisiting and celebrating the work of Michelle Pfeiffer,  the best actress of my lifetime. Sweet Liberty (1986) is a tough one. I find parts of the film charming—the scenes featuring a certain leading lady, natch—and the rest painfully boring. It's very much in the vein of the melancholy comedy, a genre that was perfected in the 1970s and 1980s. These movies are suffused with a sadness throughout, usually derived from how they portray life and love and aging and grief and everything else we face while desperately trying to avoid growing up. Sweet Liberty has all of that, but it's also a pretty standard male midlife crisis film. Alan Alda is Michael Burgess, a history professor whose historical novel is being turned into a Hollywood film, and production is taking place in the small North Carolina town where he lives. Michelle Pfeiffer is Faith Healy, a Method actress playing the female lead in the film. Faith isn't all that well defined, so it'...

I grew up loving the films of Tim Burton. From Beetlejuice to Batman Returns to Ed Wood , I thoroughly enjoyed the man's work during his heyday. I never ranked him as my favorite director, or even close, but I always appreciated his uniquely skewed style and aesthetic. At some point though, starting in the early 2000s, his movies started blending together for me. His quirkiness and aesthetic were losing some of their luster. While I haven't kept up with all of his work in recent years, I've seen enough to know I don't eagerly anticipate his new films anymore. Unless, of course, they feature Michelle Pfeiffer. I thoroughly enjoyed Burton's 2012 Dark Shadows  adaptation, and in fact it's only grown on me over the years. Beyond a few clips, I've never seen the original television series, so I can't make any comparisons between the versions. However, I can state unequivocally and for the record, that despite Johnny Depp being the top-bi...

This series looks back at the 1990s and its influence on the generation of people who came of age during the decade. 1995 was a pivotal year. So much happened in just one year. In January I felt lost, but by December I was closer to found than I could have imagined at the start of that year. With " Second Chances " I told part of that story, my '95 story, in all its chaotic glory. This started as a writing exercise based on accessing my memories to make some sort of sense of who I was that year, and how it effected who I go on to become. It helped unearth some very real and specific emotions, which I tried to express through words, as honestly as I could. As always, no names were used, to protect the innocent and the guilty. Full disclosure: I'm the only guilty party in these stories. For further reading, I've written about '95 before, in snippets, and those posts can be found  here ,  here , and  here . Some experiences or emotions alluded to briefl...