The Pen in Hand Guide to the Movies

Artwork by Michael DiMilo The Power of Love: Film Review of Past Lives By Geoff Carter ★★★★☆ The mythos surrounding love, infatuation, and desire is woven throughout the fabric of human existence. Classic romances like Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Orpheus and Eurydice, or Wuthering Heights only begin to tell love’s grand story. This story is everywhere. It permeates …
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Kickass and Sharing

Photo by Bill Stokes By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, agrees with the keeper that in all relationships, sharing is the key to tranquility, and a stunning example of that occurred when Phyllis went to considerable effort to concoct something called “Sheet-pan coconut shrimp and sweet potatoes” and the keeper dutifully and enthusiastically ate …
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Kickass Message to Boo

Photo by Bill Stokes By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, seeks the keeper’s help in sending a message to Boo, a smallish schnauzer-type dog that once lived with the keeper and Phyllis on the Mazomanie hill and who could play the piano and dance, and who invalidated the keeper’s long standing custody arrangement and …
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Kickass and “My Shadow”

Attribution: Matthew Bowden www.digitallyrefreshing.com, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, hands it over to the keeper on this Groundhog Day of shadows, as he—the keeper, actually recalls from grade school days, the first few lines of Robert Louis Stevenson “My Shadow.” Impressed with the duration of such memory clutter, the …
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Unbalanced

Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter There’s an old adage that the balance of power in American politics swings like a pendulum, and that as times and the needs of the electorate change the pendulum will swing from left to right—or right to left, as the case may be, implying there is a balance …
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Kickass and the Groundhog’s Shadow

Attribution: Anthony Quintano from Mount Laurel, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper passes along news that the Repub’s attempts to impeach the groundhog and replace it with a weasel has stalled as the entire weasel family—which includes the badger, serves notice that they …
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