Justin Jacobs
A place to call home
Month: January 2024
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Sometimes when I jump into a new book, film, or album I don’t do the reading. When I opened my Spotify app this morning I was delighted to find that Sleater-Kinney had a new album out called Little Rope. I saw they had been doing press for a new project for awhile, but I hadn’t…
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I was so bummed that our local picture house only showed Godzilla Minus One the week of Christmas and I didn’t get a chance to to see it. Getting another chance to see it, only in black and white this time, sounds killer. I’ll you see you at the movies. Godzilla Minus One Minus Color…
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There maybe no more confounding actor on the planet than Adam Sandler. You might say Nicholas Cage, but anytime he shows up in a new project I honestly know what the vibe of the film is going to be regardless of who is directing. With Sandler I’m not sure if I’m going to get a…
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The Holdovers is the eighth major picture from writer/director Alexander Payne (Sideways, Election), starring Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and newcomer Dominic Sessa. The film takes place in the 1970s at a prep school over the holidays. Giamatti plays a history teacher named Paul Hunham, who is the very definition of a crank, who gets stuck…
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They say it was the storm of the century. Our little city got buried by over 15 inches of snow yesterday. My wife and I took turns shoveling the walks in the middle of a blizzard. We lost a few tree limbs, but the power stayed on and most of our day was spent working…
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I’m a fair weather Wes Anderson fan. If I had to think of a pecking order of today’s great filmmakers, Anderson would probably be somewhere on the second or third tier under the likes of Scorsese, Nolan, Fincher and Tarantino. That said, I don’t think there’s a filmmaker, living or dead, with a better sense…
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I’m a sucker for a well made, best-of list, and no one does it better than David Ehrlich. This handcrafted mix of music and deliberately spliced scenes from some of the years best films is exquisite. It’s a beautiful celebration of cinema. Ehrlich is the chief film critic at Indie Wire, and has guest hosted…
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Lauren Groff is one of the best writers we have working today. Her 2015 novel, Fates and Furies, really blew me away with its intimate look at a modern marriage infused with elements of Greek tragedy. The novel catapulted Groff to the center of the literary world. The follow-up, a short story collection, Florida, garnered…
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As my corner of the Midwest gets walloped by one of the biggest snowstorms we’ve seen in years, I spent my morning building a snowman, shoveling the walks, and sipping some hot cocoa. I have to admit these kinds of days put me in a bit of a nostalgic mood. Well, sometimes the universe can…
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It may only be a week since I came back to WordPress after a rather long layoff, but I was shocked when I got a notification while working under-the-hood on the site that today is my 16th anniversary blogging here! My first post all those years ago was about Roger Clemens lying about his steroids…
Justin Jacobs 