Criticism

My last blog post on The Hovel is dated April 17, 2017 – over one year ago. There are plenty of reasons and justifications for my silence: I’ve been busy working on more pressing projects, Ian and I moved across the country again, we bought our first house, etc., etc. If I’m honest, though, there’s one sad underlying cause for my lack of productivity that trumps all the other excuses: I have become Hamlet…

Blog articles always seem to start with some catchy hook – a ‘lede,’ we used to call them in my college writing class. A reader will only persist in finishing the article, so said my professor, if the earliest lines are pithy, terse, and challenging, like the turn in a sonnet or the rhetorical question in a stump speech. I don’t have one of those this time around. I do, however, have a rambling thought or two about human nature brought on by contemplating one of my favorite characters in all of literature: Tolkien’s master of the woods, Tom Bombadil…

I’m just going to say it: I loved Kenneth Branagh’s recent film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic mystery novel, Murder on the Orient Express. Partially this is due to the fact that it was visually stunning. But what did I expect? That a lavishly furnished steam engine, winding its atmospheric way through snow-capped mountain passes, carrying a richly costumed cadre of some of the finest actors of our generation would be difficult to look at? Being familiar with Branagh’s penchant for over-the-top-ness, I expected a spectacle, and ladies and gentlemen, this film delivered. It was beautiful…