Field Recordings

In defense of the Clone Wars The latest Star Wars film, the animated action adventure The Clone Wars is not good theater, nor is it good theatre, it’s only a mediocre kids movie at that. So why defend it? I’ve read about a dozen reviews which slam the film for being what the franchise became as soon as the Ewoks took over Jedi in the mid-eighties…wooden and dumb. Of the seven movies only four of them are good, and only two are great. When Lucas revisited the story line he began with episode IV in the 70s it was the cinematic equivalent of the Stones reuniting for yet another world tour. The newest four films are rehashed formulas with familiar rhythms parents and their small children can move in and out of with ease. Look R2 is going to fall off a cliff and scream….Look Threepio is going to make an awkward entrance….Look Anakin’s got that dark glint in his eye again…oh no another cheeky droid soldier! The animation style of the Clone Wars is a mix of blocky game enh...

Reprinted from The Broadkill Review. If you would like any information on The Broadkill Review contact me and I’ll forward you information from the publisher, poet and critic Jamie Brown, Milton , Delaware . While I sat in a chipped school desk, its layers of pressed composite peeling back like the shell of a soft crab, my fourth grade teacher asked me to read aloud the section of our history book that dealt with Pocahontas being baptized, and when I read the sentences, my elementary brain paused, both with thrill and delight, at the mention of Reverend Alexander Whitaker, who shared my surname. Mrs. Jarvis asked me if I was related and I didn’t know what to say; I nodded or grunted goat-like and kept on reading, thrilled with the recognition that my name existed outside of my body, my life, that there was a bit of myself floating up in history, typed on the moldy, musty pages of our text. Alas, it turns out I wasn’t related to Alex Whitaker, not directly, anyhow; my own roots bel...

I drove five hundred miles to see The Dark Knight . No kidding, really. One of the main objectives of our family vacation to visit relatives and friends in the suburbs of Buffalo was to see the Dark Knight , survive the relatives, weather a class reunion, and pack as much kid friendly play into the week as possible. While we barely made it through the eight days, we managed to drag ourselves to a matinée of The DK and over the course of nearly three hours were run through the paces of an intense summer roller coaster. Where we live piggybacking movies and other entertainment is second nature, we think nothing of cramming a film between hours of shopping because if we want to see a first run movie we have to trek sixty miles. There’s no casual movie-going for us, every picture is a calculated experience. Because of this our tolerance for watching drek has decreased, for why drive sixty miles to see a B movie? If we lived in the ‘burbs going to see a B film wouldn’t...