Covering Music, Film and Pop Culture
BY JASON T SPARKS Making a documentary about an individual, when said individual has already died, presents challenges, not that said challenges are impossible to overcome; ask Ken Burns. But it’s entirely possible that...
BY JASON T. SPARKS To be a person who has seen movies, or has in fact lived in late 20th-early 21st century culture, is to have seen romantic comedies. They’ve been with us as...
By Jason T. Sparks Documentaries about an individual, much like biopics, need to function like an essay from a Freshman Comp English class–both need a thesis, a claim that the director is making about...
By Jason T Sparks Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera is predominantly in Italian, with about 5 to 10% of the dialogue in English; within the film, we learn a new and apparently unofficial Italian word...
By Jason T Sparks For the sixth year in a row, I attended the Nashville Film Festival. The first screening was reminiscent of how an evening at the cinema used to begin, albeit before...
Jason T. Sparks/ Nashville Film Festival 2022 **ed note: Normally we wait until YOU have at least a tiny chance of watching the films we review before we review them. But in this case,...
by Jason T Sparks It is entirely possible that, 20 or 30 years from now, kids will be sitting in a UCLA Film School class reading their textbooks—assuming that they’ve finally moved on from...
by Jason T Sparks What happens in the film See You Then is nothing alien, if you’re a full-grown adult who has lived any kind of life at all: two adult human beings, who...
by Jason T Sparks Her name is Josephine Sanz, or, as she would say it, elle s’appelle Josephine Sanz. She is a young French lady, all of about ten years old, and she exudes...
by Jason T Sparks Once in a great while, something happens: a documentary filmmaker will set out to make one film, and then circumstances dictate that the director is compelled to make an entirely...
