Celebrating Bethlehem's Southside Culture
Phantom Thread has garnered a litany of awards and nominations in the time it has been out, and, perhaps, that’s enough of a reason to see it. It certainly is a richly crafted movie, but you may leave the theater troubled and perplexed. Daniel Day-Lewis’ character, Reynolds Woodcock, plays the lead in what turns out…
The Shape of Water seems prophetically appropriate for our era. While watching the film, I couldn’t help but see the main antagonist, Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), in the context of the Parkland school shooting of February 14th. Truth be told, I’ve been binging my way through New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, and…
“Orlando had become a woman. There is no denying it.” So wrote Virginia Woolf in her 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography, a story of a duke turned duchess overnight. Brought to the stage by playwright Sarah Ruhl 75 years later, the play Orlando was adapted to retell the same gendered narrative only with a modern…
As a small child, my biggest fear was darkness. Even in the most heated games of hide-and-go-seek, a small closet with the lights turned off, for me, was always just better off unexplored. Oddly enough, clowns fell in that same category of doubt and mistrust, their true selves always hidden underneath an insidious veneer of…
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women opens with a few teenagers spending the day collecting Wonder Woman comics and piling them into a red wagon. In the evening, these comics are brought to a bonfire because of the comics’ feminist and BDSM portrayals. William Marston (Luke Evans), the creator of Wonder Woman, watches the spectacle….
If you could tell the world one story about yourself, what would it be? “Called an amplifier of individual stories and a catalyst for building trust,” the Dear World campaign strives to bring personal stories to broader audiences. Dear World visited Lehigh University in late September; the impact of its resulting stories remains prevalent on campus….
A towering tree—lush and fruit-bearing—grows out of asphalt. The tree’s fruit is, ostensibly, art in its many forms. This is the image painted on the back of Touchstone Theater. As embodied by the tree mural, Touchstone grew organically out of the Bethlehem arts culture. A co-founder of Touchstone, actor Bill George sat down with me…
As a cinema host and as a fan of the romantic comedy genre, I’d been looking forward to The Big Sick for months. The star and co-writer (with Emily V. Gordon) of the film, Kumail Nanjiani, has frequently remarked on his fondness for Hugh Grant’s romantic comedies. I hoped that Nanjiani’s clear passion for such…
On the nights of June 11 and 13, crowds of Beatles fans attended the limited showing of Scott Freiman’s film Deconstructing The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, as part of the “talkback series” at the SteelStacks Theater. Rubber Soul strikes me as the red-headed step child of “favorite Beatles albums.” Usually, the choices are Sgt Pepper or…
NOTE: The discussion of Colossal below contains some plot spoilers. Literature and film have always been, for me and for so many others, training in empathy. We learn to walk in the shoes of those we’ve never met, to feel as they might feel. But part of that training is to read the signs of human…