Casablanca on the Big Screen
In June, The Michigan Theater (in Ann Arbor, MI) kicked off its 2010 Summer Classic Film Series with John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and it ends next week with Fritz Lang’s newly restored Metropolis, which will feature a live organ accompaniment of the 1927 original score. …
Why I Use Tweetdeck (and You Should Too)
Disclaimer: I’m writing this post primarily with my film students in mind, but I would argue the same for non-students.
From what I can tell, most of my film students — who are required to use Twitter this semester — are turning to the Web to tweet. Since this is where …
Teaching 200 Students How to Tweet: The Challenges
For three semesters I have attempted to incorporate Twitter into the college classroom, even once relying on the service to arrange a win-a-free-textbook contest for my Film Noir students. But overall, these attempts have failed miserably as the majority of college students — at this point in time anyway — …
Everybody Loves Raymond and Seinfeld
Regular followers of Unmuzzled Thoughts have heard me blabbing that one day I’m going to publish an essay explaining why those who loved the sitcom Seinfeld should theoretically also love the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. Well, that day has come. I finally gathered my thoughts, supported them with evidence (sifting …
The Thrill of the Long Shot
Over the weekend, The Film Dr. tagged me in a blog meme begun by Stephen Russell-Gebbett who blogs over at (the interestingly titled) Checking on My Sausages and MovieMan0283 who blogs at The Dancing Image. According to the guys, the person tagged is to submit a gallery of images that …
About a week ago, I learned that on Friday, July 30, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) would air Black Hand (Richard Thorpe, 1950), a little-known film noir that stars my favorite song-and-dance man, Gene Kelly. Even though Kelly and his screen persona are completely un-noirish, I set the DVR anticipating the …
Last night I began reading Lisa Miller’s Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife. In the introduction, Miller summarizes the United States’s current views on religion and heaven.
First, nearly 80% of Americans tell polsters they’re Christian – even though that word may be defined in completely different ways (Roman Catholic, …
A couple of weeks ago, USA Today‘s pop culture blog featured a guest author, Denise Du Vernay, a lecturer in Humanities and Communications at Milwaukee School of Engineering and co-author of The Simpsons in the Classroom: Embiggening the Learning Experience with the Wisdom of Springfield (she also tweets). For her guest …
Last summer, the husband and I watched the entire series of Prison Break in roughly 5 weeks. After all was said and done, I had come to appreciate the tightly constructed narrative of the first season and characterization of Robert Knepper‘s disturbing T-Bag (right) but found myself rather irritated by …
My third column for Flow TV is now online (in case you didn’t catch the first two, they considered David Letterman’s sex scandal and star image and the working-class male in ABC’s The Middle).
Here’s a taste of my latest thoughts, this time on Glee and why the first season feels …
About five years ago, I came across a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Notes from a Career in Teaching.” (If you don’t have a Chronicle account, you may read the entire piece here.) In it, the author, a recently retired college …
