The Button Drawer

Category: Film and other media

  • The Human World Youssef Chahine

    The Human World Youssef Chahine

    The loss — of land, of food, of tradition — is due to who controls modernity, not from ignorance on the part of traditional society.

  • Best Old Music of 2023

    Best Old Music of 2023

    Time has marched on from year-end review season. I did think, briefly, to write a top-ten post but soon realized that I no longer really know what’s new, old, re-issued, re-hashed, re-recorded. Spotify says my top two artists are Alejandro Escovedo and Jean Sibelius. Only one is alive and neither had new music in 2023.…

  • Best New Music 2022

    Best New Music 2022

    I’m not a list guy or, if I can help it, even a calendar guy or, given my druthers, even a “passing of time’ guy. As Arlo Guthrie once said, “What care I for time?” You just go inch by inch, row by row until you get a zucchini. Though I aspire to be outside…

  • The Ray (and Dave) Davies Songbook — a kovers playlist with komment

    I’ve got too many things to do — work piling up, plans to hatch, work to revise, children to raise, dogs to walk, etc. all that stuff plus I have to tend my garden and keep the house from falling apart. So, yeah, perfect time to spend a day making a Spotify playlist of Kinks…

  • Rififi

    Rififi

    My first time back in a movie theater, as a fully-vaccinated cinephile, was to watch Rififi (1955) at the Music Box Theater. I loved the movie and get why the central safe-cracking / robbery scene has been referenced / ripped off since its inception. The look, the feel, the characters, the plot are absolutely gangbusters…

  • Top 5 Albums of 2020

    Top 5 Albums of 2020

    As an old who can’t be bothered to differentiate WAP from Wham!, literally nobody cares about the following list. Still, ’tis December and lists do as lists must. Therefore: What did one aging X-er, who doesn’t believe in generations (media constructs created for ad sales, sheeple!) like to listen to in pandemic year-1? Well, first…

  • “Where the World is Thin” by Kris Drever (2020)

    “Where the World is Thin” by Kris Drever (2020)

    Well, I don’t get around much any more. Not out of the house. Not out of the city. But my ears float on over to the north of Scotland, I mean waaaaaaay north, fairly often to listen to Kris Drever. He sings about those full-empty places where he is from (Orkney). Places where the landscape…

  • Bondarchuk’s Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Parts I and II)

    Bondarchuk’s Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Parts I and II)

    Notes on Parts 1 and 2 of Bondarchuk’s Tolstoy’s War and Peace Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace rests in the TCM portion of HBO Max, like a sleeping leviathan. It’s a dream you haven’t had yet. The perspective is omniscient: you are the horse driving the buggy, the woman at the fancy ball, the soldier…