I’m talking about the original 1933 version of King Kong . It is a great movie and a hell of lot more violent and gruesome than I ever thought. It must have shocked and scared the crap out of audiences in 1933. I never realized what an incredible movie it is. The stop-motion special effects ar...

I was never a huge fan of any of the Godfather movies until I watched the entire trilogy over the period of a week. ( The Godfather - Part III is the dud of the series, infamously diminished by the casting of Sofia Coppola as Michael Corleone’s daughter. She can’t act. That’s not t...

I’ve never met anyone with the name Esmé. The one and only time I’ve seen it is in J.D. Salinger’s short story, “For Esmé — with Love and Squalor.” It’s a masterpiece. It’s a quiet story about loneliness and compassion. The Wikipedia entry for the st...

Never Cry Wolf and The Snow Walker are based on works by Farley Mowat and should be seen together. If you like one, chances are you’ll like the other. The drama is magnified in both movies by the desolate and beautiful landscape of Canada’s north. In Never Cry Wolf, a scientist spends si...

“In space, no one can hear you scream.” Damn straight. (Those are the words at the end of the trailer.) I recently saw Alien in a theatre for the first time, and it was way better than any of the times I watched it on a TV screen — and I’ve seen many times over the years. And...

This time I leave it to Rick Mercer: It’s one of the best explanations of Canadian politics I’ve seen....

Because it’s Sunday and I had nothing better to do, I did a search of my MP3s of all the songs with “Jesus” in the title. Here are the results. â—� “Chocolate Jesus,” by Tom Waits — the studio version from Mule Variations, a live version from Glitter and Doom and ...

As some of you may now, I paint. Not much, but hey, it’s a start. I pick up new brushes and paints and canvases whenever I have the extra cash. A small corner of my home office is about ready to become my painting… uh… spot. All that’s really left is setting up an easel. I go...

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , Brad Pitt is born an old man and ages backwards until he becomes a child. As an old man with the emotional maturity of an adolescent, he can’t go around hitting on teenage girls, so his first sexual experiences are with older women. He’s attracted...

Three or four years ago, something like that, I noticed a post on the J-Walk Blog that no longer exists about a ukulele singer-songwriter from Cincinnati, Ohio, named Amber Nash. She was in a band called Ukebucket. They used to have a real website but the URL must have expired and they forgot to ren...