Miraclo Miles

     Not meant to be in the least comprehensive, but some of what's on my list of upcoming watch items:     Now that the Writer's strike is functionally over (next week will see the late night talk shows, and things like the much-missed John Oliver's Last Week Tonight returning this Sunday to HBO, as I saw it come back to life in my DVR pre-sets) - and hopefully the actor's strike soon to follow, with the new WGA contract template ideally helping to light the path - the gears of the entertainment machine should soon begin to turn again. Everyone seems very anxious to get back to work. With the promise of new work beginning to be more likely, we should see some more of what's been held in reserve begin to be officially scheduled -- those projects shot prior to the strike, that streamers had held back should the strike roll on into progressively leaner times.     Arriving today on Amazon Prime is a three-episode kick-off for the eig...

     Just finishing up a four-year stretch of doing Friday posts of tv, film and streaming media for the Consortium of Seven blog - which is shutting down on October 3, 2023 - I'm aiming to dust this place off and make a regular go of this blog for the first time in too many years.

    By the close of the 20th century it occurred to me that perhaps every place I'd seen a movie from childhood through my twenties no longer existed.    Time and commerce had closed locations, and even eliminated entire theater chains. Today's post is about the first couple theaters I went to, among the many that now exist only in memory and a few photographs that others had taken and managed to find their way into various Internet archives.    We moved down from Rhode Island into the house I would grow up in in the summer of 1966. This was shortly after my brother was born. I had just turned five that April. If I'd ever been out to see a movie before all of that, I have no recollection of it. We were living in base housing up in Rhode Island (my father had been in his first career, as an officer in the U.S. Navy, since the late '40s), so it's entirely possible there was something from back when I was maybe 3 or 4 where I was dropped ...

  A s some wiser folk have observed, remembered family history often varies from the details others remember. If relating some things eventually brings me some corrective epiphany, so be it, but for the moment these are my memories, and that's good enough for this and now.      My father was largely out of the picture by my 10th birthday.      There had been considerable, simmering tension on the home front for many years, well before I came along, but a blend of wanting to maintain appearances for propriety's sake - both in the eyes of extended family and of my father's superior officers, as he was in the thick of what would become his first career, in the US Navy - my mother's self-cripplingly rigid adherence to elements of her Catholic faith, and the stretches of relative peace at home while he was at sea, on deployment, combined to keep them technically together for far longer than they likely should have. My older sisters...