Ars Est Mendacium

The first time I watched The Mission, I didn’t think about treaties or papal politics. I thought about weight. A man lashed to his own past, muscles trembling as he drags a sack of armor up a cliff while the falls thunder beside him. On another day, I might have rolled my eyes at the obviousness of it. Sin, personified. Guilt made metal. But the longer the camera holds, the more the body persuades. We believe in burdens because we know how they feel. When the Guaraní cut the rope and the mass tumbles away, the release arrives first in the lungs, then in the mind. It is melodrama built from effort, not speeches. You forgive him because you’ve wanted that moment for yourself. The story is simple and not simple. Eighteenth-century South America. Jesuit missions were built among and with the Guaraní. Two empires redrawing borders as if land were a chessboard. Jeremy Irons plays Father Gabriel, a quiet priest who offers music before he offers words. Robert De Niro plays Rodrigo Mendoza, a m...

  “How can I change the world, If I can’t even change myself? How can I change the way I am? I don’t know. I don’t know.” —Faithless,  Salva Mea I heard that lyric again the other night, quietly, as the day was winding down and I wasn’t trying to think too hard. But it found me anyway. There’s something about it that bypasses intellect and goes straight to the place where your unfinished business lives. The part of you that still flinches. You still wonder if the change you claim to want is still out of reach. A few days later, I rewatched  Changing Lanes . Not because I planned to, not for content or critique, but because I saw the title in a list and felt something stir. And what unfolded wasn’t nostalgia or even entertainment. It was recognition. A gut-level awareness of what this film actually is: not a thriller, not a legal drama, but a confession in two voices. It opens with a crash. Literally. Two men, Gavin Banek, a high-powered lawyer rushing to file a crucial do...

I first heard the name “Spig” in a dim living room with a television humming like a refrigerator. John Wayne stood at the top of a staircase, and the next moment, he wasn’t standing at all. He fell, and a life broke in two. The movie called it The Wings of Eagles. The man it was about was Frank W. “Spig” Wead, a naval aviator turned Hollywood writer. The fall made sense of everything. It wasn’t a spectacle. It was a hinge. We like to sort John Wayne films into categories we can carry: cavalry, frontier, war. This one resists the box. It’s a biography built like a sea shanty; start loud, hit the waves, then sing the quiet verses that tell the truth. John Ford mixes bruised comedy with hospital-room silence. Maureen O’Hara plays the wife who knows how much a marriage can take before it thins to a thread. Ward Bond lumbers in as a cigar-chomping director modeled on Ford himself, a wink that keeps the film from turning into a memorial service. If you came for dogfights, you’ll get some air...

In 1988, a young woman was raped in a bar. On a pinball machine. While men cheered. It wasn’t a headline, though it easily could have been. It was a scene from a film called  The Accused . But the horror of it didn't feel distant or fictional. It felt too real. Too familiar. The kind of thing we hope never happens, but know in our bones already does. The woman was named Sarah Tobias. She had messy hair, a denim jacket, and a loud mouth. She was played by Jodie Foster, who wasn’t supposed to get the part. Studios didn’t think she was right for it. Too smart, too reserved, too Yale. But Foster wanted it, fought for it. And when she got it, she gave it everything. Sarah Tobias is not the kind of victim movies usually give us. She drinks. She dances. She argues. She doesn't look for sympathy. She demands it. And that’s what made her unforgettable. You couldn’t tuck her into a corner of your conscience and move on. You had to sit with her. All of her. The story unfolds like this: Sa...

Photo by Bart Singer - © 2013 - Barefoot Pictures, LLC I know this is a strange choice to launch a blog about art and culture, a forgotten romantic dramedy from 2014 that critics barely touched and the mental health community seemed to swat away on reflex, like a gnat that got too close to a diagnosis.  Barefoot  is not a canonical work. It’s not visionary or cult-classic. It's a quiet movie by traditional standards. But it’s where I’m starting.  Barefoot , odd, unassuming, and almost accidentally revealing, is part of what drove me to create this space in the first place. This blog wasn’t born out of a need to celebrate prestige. It was born out of frustration at how often cultural works, especially small, fragile, tonally strange ones, get misread, flattened, or dismissed by people who seem not to have experienced them at all. The kind of “critical drive-by” that reduces a film to a logline, a thumbnail, or worse, a hashtag for outrage. I wrote about this in m...