Scott Frank is a long-time screenwriter and more recent director best known for his screenplays for Logan and Minority Report (among other box office successes) as well as being the creator of the Neflix series Godless and The Queen’s Gambit. His first novel, Shaker, was published in 2016, and I became aware of it that …
Author Archives: Aden Jordan
David Thomson’s Disaster Mon Amour
Famed British-born, San Francisco-based author David Thomson recently published Disaster Mon Amour, a slim 198 page book on our collective cinematic addiction to disaster. Thomson has been very prolific recently and has published several thoughtful and provocative books in the past few years. His Sleeping with Strangers argued that our collective love affair with beautiful …
Interesting Things I Read and Saw in 2021
One of the main reasons I rarely blog is that most film blogs I come across have a diary style that is a lot weaker than the type of strong, formal film criticism found in a rare film magazine such as Cineaste. Since I don’t venture out to movie theaters again just yet, it would …
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A Few Thoughts on Adam Nayman’s David Fincher Book
I finished reading film critic and academic Adam Nayman’s auteurist take on the American filmmaker David Fincher, David Fincher: Mind Games, last week. Since the book isn’t that fresh in my mind, I’ll skip a full review and just post a few thoughts I had on it. Overall, Nayman has released a very fine, attractive, …
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Briarpatch on Peacock
I was late to Andy Greenwald and Rosario Dawson’s single season television series Briarpatch. The series, cancelled after one season at the start of 2020, was based upon a novel by Ross Thomas. Dawson plays a U.S. Senate investigator who has left D.C. and returned to her small hometown in Texas to investigate the car …
On Alex Garland’s Heady and Frustrating DEVS
After not updating this blog in nearly two months, I felt compelled to write again after spending months watching, taking breaks from, and then returning to writer-director Alex Garland’s eight episode mini-series Devs from Hulu and FX. While I try to make my essays about the texts I critique and not my personal experience in …
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“Doctor Sleep: The Director’s Cut” Will Keep You Awake
I was late to Mike Flanagan’s 2019 Doctor Sleep, a sequel to one of the best films made by Stanley Kubrick, The Shining (1980). Did the likely best horror movie of all time need a sequel? No, but Stephen King did write the novel The Shining in 1977 and then wrote its sequel Doctor Sleep …
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Edward Norton’s Ambitious, Intelligent Motherless Brooklyn
I was late to Edward Norton’s 2019 film adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn, mainly because the reviews I came across on the film had been critical of how far Norton strayed from Lethem’s source material. I’m happy to report that Norton’s film is ambitious, intelligent, dense, and makes for a fine and …
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From The Dog Whisperer’s First Book
“It’s been published elsewhere, and I am not ashamed to say it:: I came to the United States illegally. I now have my residence card, have paid a large fine for crossing illegally, and am applying for full citizenship status. There’s no country I’d rather live in than the United States. I truly believe it …
It Was Pretty Good
I was late to Andy Muschietti’s It: Chapter Two. I had seen the first film in theaters and was impressed by its suspense, psychological terror, and harsh view of the world. Having seen much of the It mini-series I didn’t feel much need to see Muschietti’s second film until I felt drawn to the movie …
Aden Thomas Jordan 