OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Another class of people
Merle Haggard's best song is arguably "Hungry Eyes."
It is, at the least, his best lyric, about a childhood of deprivation and the toll that took on the singer's mother. It starts in "a canvas-covere...
November 29, 2020
OPINION | ON BOOKS: Against cliche—Martin Amis hungers for seriousness
There are habits of mind that aren't worth breaking.
For instance, I think of Martin Amis — the "Mick Jagger of literature ... the most dazzling stylist in post-war British fiction," to quote a book ...
November 29, 2020
OPINION | NEW MOVIES: Day after turkey day a real treat
When many of us were kids, the day after Thanksgiving wasn't known as Black Friday, and it wasn't much of a shopping day until the late 1980s.
But apparently, the term to describe the day after Thank...
November 27, 2020
ON FILM
Watch Philip Martin’s OnFilm column at: arkansasonline.com/1127film/
9HDmYn4Uglo
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HDmYn4Uglo]
November 27, 2020
OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Thinking of Del
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
-- French philosopher Blaise Pascal, 1654
There was a story Roger Ebert used to tell about John Candy.
In the ...
November 24, 2020
OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Nov. 22, 1963
Buddy was walking across the Radcliffe Quad at Harvard when a classmate ran up to him and told him the news. For years it made him ashamed to be from Shreveport, which felt to him and to the people he...
November 22, 2020
OPINION | CRITICAL MASS: Joni Mitchell— Proud 'folk singer' extraordinaire
"The early stuff, I shouldn't be such a snob against it. A lot of these songs, I just lost them. They fell away. They only exist in these recordings. For so long I rebelled against the term, 'I was ne...
November 22, 2020
OPINION | NEW MOVIES: Best bets on TV with 'Mank,' documentaries
Normally, we'd be caught up in awards-grubbing prestige movies this time of year.
But we have been disrupted. "Wonder Woman 1984," originally meant to come out in November 2019, is the only blockbust...
November 20, 2020
ON FILM
Watch Philip Martin’s OnFilm column at: arkansasonline.com/1120film/
3KdT8zksRRY
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KdT8zksRRY]
November 20, 2020
'Buddy Games'
Almost nobody remembers that when Mike Judge's eerily prescient film "Idiocracy" was released in 2006, it wasn't screened for critics. The studio didn't even prepare a press kit; they only made two fi...
November 20, 2020
OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: A long November
November is a favorite month. It's full of birthdays. It's normally the month we travel.
We've had Thanksgiving in Dublin and have spent several wedding anniversaries in France, including on Armistic...
November 17, 2020
OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Conspiratorial whispers
Checking the social media feeds of intemperate people is fascinating, a dive into an alternative reality where the "leftist Murdoch brothers" have sold out America and One America News, Newsmax and Th...
November 15, 2020
OPINION | CRITICAL MASS: The perfect Petty
We hadn't quite been married a year when we bought a house in west Little Rock, a three-bedroom, two-bath job with a cathedral ceiling in the living room that would frustrate any attempts at air condi...
November 15, 2020
OPINION | ON BOOKS: 'Sun Collective' Charles Baxter's novel of ideas
Charles Baxter had a moment about 20 years ago when it seemed that everybody (at least everybody on the internet) was reading his "Feast of Love," a playful attempt to transpose "A Midsummer Night's D...
November 15, 2020
OPINION | REVIEW: Echo Boomers’, first effort for Arkansan, shows us a crafty, intelligent and ambitious film
Seth Savoy grew up in Maumelle and attended Little Rock's Catholic High. He went to the University of Central Arkansas for two years before being offered a scholarship from Columbia College in Chicago...
November 13, 2020