Sight & Sound #11 Sunrise (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #59)

Following my coverage of Jeanne Dielman, Beau Travail, and Close-Up, Sunrise is the first film in my Sight & Sound podcast miniseries that I saw before this particular project; however, in all these years of online work I've never discussed it in depth. The F.W. Murnau-directed silent film is famous as, among other things, arguably the first real Best Picture winner at the Oscars (it won a one-time-only "Unique and Artistic Picture" award alongside Wings' canonized victory for "Outstanding Picture"). It's been a mainstay on the Sight & Sound list for decades although 2022 saw it slip slightly from its 2012 peak at #5. The story of a husband (George O'Brien) considering the murder of his wife (Janet Gaynor) because he's under the sway of a diabolical "Woman from the City" (Margaret Livingston), Sunrise makes several unexpected and enthralling swerves in narrative, tone, and character. How in the world does a brooding melodrama set in a rural village find time for a drunken pig on the floor of an urban Jazz Age nightclub dance floor?! I love the film - and Murnau's work generally - for its willingness to wander, but of course Sunrise's appeal goes far beyond the narrative: this is just an absolutely gorgeous film to look at. Re-visiting this movie takes me back to the early days of this site, when I covered silent cinema with much more frequency than in recent years. While the film hails from an era that's now a century past, it's fascinating to consider how close it is to the present - as I point out on the podcast, the three central actors lived into the mid-eighties, all dying within a year of one another and (just barely) within my own lifetime.

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The Olympic Films, part 7 of 7: Summer 1928 / 1924 / 1912 (+ 1920 & 1896 - 1908 bonus) & Winter 2010 / 2014 / 2018 / 2022 (broadcast)

Visit the full directory

for the introduction & line-up of monthly capsules

running from August 2021 to February 2022

The Olympic Films, part 1 of 7: Summer 2021 (broadcast) / 2016 / 2012 / 2008 & Winter 1924 / 1928 / 1936 (+ 1932 bonus)

Visit the full directory

for the introduction & line-up of monthly capsules

running from August 2021 to February 2022

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a film inside of a film inside of a film. It encloses its various narratives, nesting them inside other narratives using a particular kind of dramatic twist - one that demolishes our initial context  - as a method of disorientation. Filmmakers from Alfred Hitchcock to M. Night Shymalan and David Lynch (who will definitely come up a couple more times in this review) walk the same crooked path this silent German Expressionist horror film paved. The power of the twist-trick, a gimmick at worst, an epiphany at best, is that nothing is the same afterwards: it doesn't only change our perception of whatever particular detail it skews, it makes us question everything - including the twist itself. Caligari is not the neatest use of the device, and at times it can feel clumsy, incomplete, or on-the-nose. But it is one of the most ambitious deployments of the twist (there are several twists, in fact) and one of the most deeply rooted in a profound historical moment.

The Favorites - The Passion of Joan of Arc (#8)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928/France/dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer) appeared at #8 on my original list.

What it is • Joan of Arc lived from 1412 to 1431, dying when she was still a teenager; her legendary accomplishments - turning back a British invasion of France, following the voices she heard in her head - were achieved nearly six centuries ago. In over a hundred years of cinema, there have been dozens of adaptations of her life (Wikipedia counts forty - including Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure!). Nine countries have participated (all Western except for Japan - which aired a French opera). Acclaimed directors, including Georges Méliès, Cecil B. DeMille, Victor Fleming, Roberto Rossellini, Otto Preminger, Robert Bresson, Paul Verhoeven, Werner Herzog, Jacques Rivette, and Luc Besson, have offered their interpretations. Geraldine Ferrar, Michèle Morgan, Jean Seberg, Hedy Lamarr, Julie Harris, Geneviève Bujold, Janet Suzman, Sandrine Bonnaire, and Leelee Sobieski have all played Joan - Ingrid Bergman even played her twice, once for her husband (joining a tradition stretching from Méliès' wife Jeanne d'Alcy,  to Besson's wife Milla Jovovich, though d'Alcy didn't marry Melies for another thirty years and Jovovich divorced Besson between the film's production and release). With such a storied history - and I haven't even mentioned the excellent La Marveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, which followed the film being reviewed by barely a year - you'd think there would be some difficulty in determining the Joan of Arc masterpiece. But there isn't. The Passion of Joan of Arc routinely appears near the very top of all-time great lists, Carl Theodor Dreyer is widely considered the greatest filmmaker to tackle the topic, and Falconetti is praised as the most superb Joan. That's an understatement, actually; many would rank her performance as the greatest in the entire history of cinema. The Passion of Joan of Arc, which focuses exclusively on the trial and execution of Joan, has a tumultuous history. It was controversial when it was shot - territorial French critics despised the idea of a Dane reproducing their saint - and it was frequently banned and censored. Multiple, corrupted versions existed for decades until the original cut was discovered in the early eighties in, of all places, a Norwegian mental institution. Rather differently from Dreyer's sound films, Passion (considered by many the apex of silent cinema) consists almost entirely of close-ups of actor's faces, a riveting, hypnotic symphony of actors' expressions exemplifying the art of intercutting reaction shots.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - The Gold Rush (#36)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Gold Rush (1925/USA/dir. Charlie Chaplin) appeared at #36 on my original list.

What it is • A lone prospector (Charlie Chaplin) waddles up an icy Yukon path, a polar bear calmly following in his footsteps. The ambitious tramp will be stalked by many more troubles before the film ends: he is buried in snow, challenged to fights by burly rivals, nearly frozen in a little cabin, starved to the point of eating his own shoelaces like spaghetti, almost shot by his hungry, hallucinating compatriot Big Jim (Mack Swain) who envisions him as a giant chicken, trapped in a cabin that has been blown precariously onto the edge of a cliff during the night, and, perhaps worst of all, heartbroken by the mocking flirtations of dance hall girl Georgia (Georgia Hale). The little guy meets all these challenges with his usual pluck and imagination, and the film features some of Chaplin's most memorable gags: the aforementioned chicken and shoelaces, of course, but also the frantic balancing act required as the cabin nearly topples over that cliff, and, on a more delicate note, his bread-roll dance number (featured above). The usual mix of pathos and comedy applies, especially in the original, longer cut which Chaplin shortened seventeen years later. Though City Lights and Modern Times provide close competition (and are a bit more complex), this may be Chaplin's most beloved film - it was certainly one of the biggest hits of the silent era.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Pandora's Box (#75)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Pandora's Box (1929/Germany/dir. G.W. Pabst) appeared at #75 on my original list.

What it is • Lulu just wants to have fun. Despite this seemingly simple motivation, she holds immense fascination for us as well as the characters onscreen. Her troubled past (there are intimations of both extreme neglect and abuse as a child) drives her into a hungry, unapologetic enjoyment of the present: cheerfully embracing various lovers, refusing to be tossed off as a diversion, always eager for excitement and sensation. The first hour of the film charts Lulu's rise from chorus girl to wife of her wealthy patron, and the second hour follows her fall through a variety of different locations and situations. This suggests an epic scale but Pandora's Box is more accurately described as a series of intimate moments despite quite a few crowded setpieces (the stage production, the wedding, the trial, the gambling barge). G.W. Pabst's direction is characterized by precision and focus, avoiding Murnau's ambitious scope or Lang's towering monumentalism in favor of detail and gesture. Above all, Pandora's Box is centered around the face of Louise Brooks. Film history is littered with star vehicles, many of which probably feature those stars in a greater quantity of close-ups or even screentime. Yet I'm hard-pressed to think of many other movies so utterly defined by the screen presence at their center. Pandora's Box is based on the iconic plays of Franz Wedekind, who turned Lulu into a cultural icon in Germany, and Pabst was a widely-respected director of silent cinema. In theory, the film should not be reducible to its star. And yet whenever Louise Brooks is on screen, it's as if everything else exists as a frame for her charisma. Which is...

Why I like it •

The Favorites - La Roue (#76)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. La Roue (1923/France/dir. Abel Gance) appeared at #76 on my original list.

What it is • One sunny day a train crashes in a hybrid urban/rural landscape (a countryside crisscrossed by railroads and other industrial clutter). Sisif (Severin-Mars), a virile young engine driver, rescues the orphaned Norma and decides to raise her as his daughter. Unfortunately, Sisif's delight in this "rose of the rail" is cast in a more sinister light when she grows into a beautiful young woman (Ivy Close) and he finds himself attracted to her. This horrible desire (which Sisif is determined to deny and keep a secret) drives much of the film's tragic action, but there are many other elements weighing on his body and soul too - all of life is represented (repeatedly and none too subtly) as a wheel that keeps relentlessly turning, wearing the characters down over the course of this four-and-a-half-hour film. Sounds miserable, right? Yet the film is also deeply beautiful, capturing the crisscrossing lines and plumes of black smoke in the railyards, and later the stirring, epic peaks and valleys of the Alps where an aging Sisif, slowly going blind, is reassigned to guide a pathetic little funicular engine in his waning days. The cutting is superb, with an accelerating onslaught of images clashing yet complementing one another; this is revolutionary montage a year before Sergei Eisenstein made Strike, and more concerned with accumulation than contrast. And the performances of Severin-Mars and Ivy Close are monumental in their expressiveness, capturing the subtle shifts as their characters lose their youth but never quite their vitality. La Roue was a benchmark in the silent era, essentially forgotten for decades but re-discovered in recent years. Abel Gance, fresh off the acclaimed J'Accuse and several years shy of his even more groundbreaking Napoleon, is concerned with innovative technique onscreen, but he is also deeply invested in the soul of the picture (which opens with a tribute to his young wife, who died while he was making La Roue). This is a film that recognizes beastliness and beauty as two sides of the same human coin.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Faust (#91)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Faust (1926/Germany/dir. F.W. Murnau) appeared at #91 on my original list.

What it is • Faust (Gosta Ekman), an aged alchemist, hovers over his books and contraptions in a narrowed, clustered abbey. When a plague spreads through his village - depicted as a billowing black mist rolling through the steeples and gabled rooftops like a diseased avalanche - the doctor despairs of a cure and sells his soul to the devil for the good of mankind. Meeting Mephistophales (Emil Jannings) at the proverbial crossroads, he'll eventually sign a contract in blood. Sure enough, his healing powers increase - but so does his horror of crucifixes, leading the ungrateful villagers to discover his secret and stone him out of town. From there he embarks on a whirlwind journey, regaining his youth and soaring on a magic cloak to foreign lands where he will seduce princesses, brood atop volcanoes, and eventually depart for his beloved home for a romantic springtime interlude (chasing his beloved Gretchen - Camilla Horn - in a dewy glen) which will predictably be all too brief. Tragedy, misunderstanding, and betrayal ensue. Did the alchemist seal his doom with his crimson signature, or will love conquer all in the flames of martyrdom? Faust, F.W. Murnau's last film in Germany, is an Expressionist masterpiece - all iconic, exaggerated figures and fog shot through with beams of light and craggy, crooked sets - but it finds time to savor the human moment as well as go for the grand effects.

Why I like it •

Comedy Countdown - Modern Times (a video essay)

My entry in the Comedy Countdown, a video essay on Modern Times mixing and matching three iconic texts on the famous film, from Otis Ferguson, Roland Barthes, and Graham Greene. Enjoy!

Silence is Golden: the two versions of The Gold Rush

In the famed Kuleshov experiment, conducted in the Soviet Union immediately after the Russian Revolution, it was demonstrated that audiences would react differently to the same exact shot depending on what shots followed or preceded it. The actor in close-up was interpreted as mourning, for example, when intercut with the image of a corpse, or hungry when alternated with food, or even happy when juxtaposed with a child laughing. There were obvious implications for the theory of montage, but it isn't only editing that alters viewers perception this way: camera position, movement of camera, and movement of actors within the frame can all subtly alter an audience's impression of the same scene, while the more circumstantial elements of a film - like art direction, lighting, or color scheme - can ironically have an even stronger effect.

And then there's the soundtrack, one of the subtlest yet most effective ways to manipulate a viewer. It's an especially problematic element in the case of silent films, whose musical scores were often up for grabs - dependent on what the house organist felt like playing, in later years reliant on whatever generic recordings the video distributor was able to use. That's just music - what of an actual narration, imposed upon the material that orginally "spoke visually"; is such an imposition blasphemy or merely a logical, technological update?

When he re-released The Gold Rush in 1942, Charlie Chaplin nervously cut down his 1925 box-office smash, eliminated the intertitles, composed a new score, and added a playful (self-recorded) voiceover. Mindful that audiences used to talkies might grow restless, Chaplin had taken a sharp turn from his earlier position; for years he had been Hollywood's most (ironically) eloquent voice on the lost art of pantomime, resisting the onset of sound so stubbornly that he waited a dozen years after The Jazz Singer before allowing himself to speak onscreen. Yet apparently Chaplin (along with audiences and critics) was pleased with the results, labelling this cut "definitive" and allowing the original version to disappear from circulation.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Few people remember that The Passion of Joan of Arc ends with a rousing action sequence. It’s as good, in its own way, as anything Eisenstein ever did, yet with its own very unique character. Dreyer, unlike Eisenstein, is linking shots which create a fluid meaning yet, pregnant with a kind of integral power, could also stand alone – they are not dependent on their connections with one another for their sense of purpose. This is Dreyer’s approach throughout Passion, neither foregrounding montage nor mise en scene, or rather foregrounding both – the propulsive music of his editing and the graceful aura of each individual close-up.

Sometimes I feel that cutting between close-ups robs us of the power in character interaction, in which two different people share the same space. Not here: the intensity of the back-and-forth not only suits the subject matter, in which Joan is isolated (“alone with God” as she puts it) against her interrogators, it also carries a sharp aesthetic power, the power, perhaps, of individual realities, states of consciousness which share the same space but not the same experience (hence, in a visual medium which communicates the metaphysical by way of the physical, not even the same space).

At any rate, viewers tend to forget, or not talk about, the violent conclusion because what comes before is so overpowering, so fundamentally sound and right, that it puts even this riveting finale to shame. The Passion of Joan of Arc is much like Joan herself, at least as she’s represented in this film: so pure and sure of itself, so able to allow to its inner integrity to dictate its every choice and action, that it shines like a beacon from the screen, right back at the projector which cast it out, as if to challenge and discredit its genesis in mere material.

Metropolis ("The Tower of Babel")

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Well, here we are again - "The Big Ones" has resumed after a two-week break. From now on, I'll be posting rapid-fire, twice a day since these entries have been written ahead of time. Part of the reason I took my extended break, besides blogger burnout, was ambivalence about the series mission. I think it's a great idea to grapple with the warhorses of cinema history, but sometimes it can be difficult to find something to say. Not necessarily because so much has been said already (I feel everyone has their own unique perspective to articulate, and that they will notice things or make connections others have not) - but because I don't always respond strongly to the work in question. "The Big Ones" is not "The Favorites" (though I'd like to do that series too someday) despite some overlap. To be honest, I probably would not repeat the exercise, as there's a "forced" quality to the viewing - even the ones I normally enjoy - that can make it more of a chore than a pleasure, though I hope the pieces themselves have been enjoyable.

Metropolis is a no-brainer for inclusion in such an exercise. It's a hugely famous film, maybe the most famous of the silent era, and its influence on science fiction, one of the most popular screen genres, has been immense. It's one of the two or three most celebrated films of an iconic auteur, Fritz Lang, whose very visage screams "film director" with only Erich von Stroheim and Cecil B. DeMille as rivals. And it's part of one of the key national movements in film history, German Expressionism, with its lavish sets, moody lighting, and stylized acting. However, to be perfectly honest, I've never been crazy about Metropolis. I love many of the images and sequences but as a whole it fails to capture me. The story is not particularly enticing and so much of the movie revolves around the narrative; individual set pieces get to soar skyward but there's always some plot development or expositional sequence to bring the film back down to earth. The fault is probably with me, for missing some key connection that everyone else is getting, but there it is. There are other Langs I like way more (Die Nibelungen particularly strikes my fancy) and really, I'm much more a Murnau guy anyway.

However, for two or three minutes Metropolis completely sucks me under its spell. That's the passage I want to discuss right now, by far my favorite sequence in the movie: Maria's mesmerizing reimagining of the Tower of Babel, delivered during a sermon to desperate workers who slave away in the underground factory that keeps Metropolis humming.

Avant-Garde: The Silents ("Fixing a Hole")

A new month, a new theme for "Fixing a Hole". The year ends with the avant-garde, and today I've tapped Maurizio Roca, whose noir countdown was one of the highlights of 2011, to address three of his favorite avant-garde films of the 1920s. I added the pictures and videos. Maurizio writes about Entr'acte, Emak-Bakia, and Ghosts Before Breakfast here:

Read "Avant-Garde: The Silents" on Wonders in the Dark

"Opening with a startling close-up of a man looking through a movie camera, we are quickly led to a barrage of abstract and animated images (some taken from the earlier Le Retour a la Raison) that instantly plunge us into a world of bewilderment. A similar tact was taken by Clair’s Entr’acte, when after a relatively docile opening, the filmmaker quickly pulled out the rug from under us with a swift journey into abstraction. Emak Bakia (at least in the Kino version) is greatly aided by the mournful string-heavy score that accompanies it. Early on, the visual focus, like Entr’acte, is centered primarily on slow-motion movement. We are given the various traits that make up film art and watch as they are applied in nonlinear and unconventional ways. The concentration always seems to be simply about reveling in this new medium’s impressionistic possibilities above all else. Where the dancer was the underlying image of movement that Clair returned to early in his short, Ray instead decides to devote his time with distorted depictions of artifacts we cannot make out clearly. They come and go with no established delineation other than to reveal the ability to gracefully move before our eyes."

The General

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

I've heard that The General was essentially remade, straight, as a wartime chase film (I think it was a Disney production, maybe The Great Locomotive Chase). Or rather that the original historical incident - a spy (Northern in reality, Southern in the film) seizes or reclaims an engine, piloting it through enemy territory - was adapted once again. This is not the only time a Keaton film was reincarnated (Seven Chances was remade with Chris O'Donnell as The Bachelor); while it would seem bizarre to remake a Chaplin film, it makes sense for Keaton to see this treatment. Why? He's certainly as inimitable as Chaplin, perhaps more so - while Chaplin's comic inventions can be copied by mimics, Keaton's stunts should not be attempted by the weak-hearted, legally sane, or uninsured.

The obvious answer (as indicated by the Disney film which circumvented The General and went back to the source) is that, well, many of the best Keaton films actually had plots - with a catchy angle. Or as I put it in my review of Seven Chances a few years ago: "Almost every picture is not only a vehicle for his unique talents, but a clever high concept idea as well." This is true - but there are other qualities that sets Keaton films apart from other comedies of the time, and makes them appear to be about more than just him: ambition, scale, and style. I promise this will be my last self-quote, but I don't want to pretend I'm not repeating myself here: in celebrating Our Hospitality, I wrote, "he could easily have fashioned romantic epics of American history, because he has the pictorial, spatial sense of a John Ford or D.W. Griffith." No film better bares out those comparisons, especially the latter, than his masterpiece, The General.

City Lights

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

"Here is my secret. It is very simple: one sees well only with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eye." - Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince

The genius of City Lights lies in its paradoxical ability to convey the heart's invisible essence in entirely visual terms. Entirely visual terms: shot when Hollywood had completely switched over to talkies, the film stubbornly sticks to silence. There are a few clever exceptions. Charlie swallows a whistle which, whenever he hiccups, interrupts entertainers, calls cabs, and attracts every dog in the neighborhood. When boxing (in what is probably the film's funniest and most brilliant sequence), the mismatched Tramp somehow gets the bell rope tied to his neck, so that he can't go very far without it dinging and either calling him back into the ring or deceptively luring him into a well-earned respite. Most notably, the film opens with sound, "dialogue" of a sort which is actually over-recorded gibberish pouring forth from a pontificating politician. It's not only a humorous send-up of official pomposity, but a goof on Hollywood's new obsession with sound itself.

However, while the verbal distortion brings a smile to the face, it is appropriately enough a visual revelation that makes one laugh out loud: a white sheet is lifted from a newly christened monument, and Chaplin is discovered sleeping in the arms of the bombastic statuary, ironically called "Peace and Prosperity." He will experience little of either throughout the course of the movie, yet he does get get little tastes - teases really - of both peace and prosperity throughout. One could say that the comedy is inspired by the glimpses of prosperity (via a wealthy drunkard who showers money and good times on the Tramp - at least until he sobers up), while the pathos is provided by the potential for peace (in the form of a beautiful flower girl who loves Charlie, sight unseen, for his generosity).

The Battleship Potemkin

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

The Battleship Potemkin could be subtitled "A Story of the Sea." For while the men who scurry about its frame - those anonymous and amorphous masses - instigate the action, it is the ambiguously gleaming waters around the ship, and the ship itself, that most reflect the narrative arc. When the film begins, the sea is forbidding, isolating, intimidating: a mass of impenetrable emptiness encircling the starving and discontented battleship. Its shimmering presence heightens our impression of the sailors as imprisoned by their circumstances, and zeroes our focus in on the ship that holds them; after all, there's nothing else to look at, for them or for us.

Yet the film concludes with another shot of these waters and suddenly our interpretation is quite different. At this point the battleship Potemkin steams toward the squadron sent to shoot it down, only to discover that the other ships have been overtaken by sympathetic sailors, more interested in saluting than shooting the mutinous barge. And suddenly the sea is an open field, a liberating space upon which anything is possible. Its shimmers seem friendly winks, its little waves infinite possibilities, its wide-open landscape a heroic horizon. Eisenstein's title tells us that the ship is waving the flag of freedom and it's as if this banner is clearing the air, swatting away the mosquitoes of reaction and the haze of oppression, parting the waves as crisply and cleanly as the ship's bow itself.

Jazz Age Visions 1926 - 1929 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 2

The second chapter of "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.

View "Chapter 2: Jazz Age Visions"
(2015 update - includes Vimeo embed after the jump)


Jazz Age Visions

Following the first flush of discovery, when the miracle of movement held everyone in thrall, great directors began pushing cinematic boundaries. The tempo picked up, the effects became more elaborate, the techniques sharpened and personalized. This adventurous spirit reached its height in the late twenties - the films here provide name after illustrious name in the auteur canon. It would be another forty years before filmmakers had such freedom again, yet most of these young men would continue working, albeit often under difficult circumstances. Here was where they got their start - in the last, heady days of the silent era, as the Jazz Age boomed towards its bust and visions spoke louder than words.

Dance of the Silents 1912 - 1926 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 1

The first chapter of "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update - includes Vimeo embed after the jump)


View "Chapter 1: Dance of the Silents"

Dance of the Silents 

In the early days, everything was difficult and anything was possible. Ingenuity and technical know-how were prerequisites, but all was new so imagination was unhampered by exhaustion or familiarity. Vampires glided into bedrooms, Babylonians paraded down colossal stairways, abstract forms danced across the screen, and bugs spied on one another's sex lives. There are quite a few masters in this first chapter, yet most of the films seem to have, alongside their boundless creative energy, a sort of elemental simplicity. Styles will grow more complicated, visions more elaborate in the next chapter, but at first, the wonder of the moving image seemed magic enough.

100 Classics of Silent Cinema

Allan Fish has today concluded his ambitious countdown of the one hundred best films from the early years of cinema. You can catch up with the full selection here and read his entry on the #1 film here. Don't forget to take the poll either - myself, I'm working double-time to catch up with and re-watch classic silents over the next two weeks so I can feel up to participating. But even if you don't have time for reappraisals or first-time screenings, let your voice be heard! The more the merrier.

And by the way, merry Palm Sunday - as a lapsed Catholic, I fondly recall this holiday. I always enjoyed the theatrics of reading the liturgy aloud in church, and of all those palm fronds waving in the air.

This post was originally published on The Sun's Not Yellow.