THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

For the first time since its inception, I was unable to see even one film at the Traverse City Film Festival this year. It wasn't for lack of desire, of course, but rather a scheduling conflict between the TCFF and Lollapalooza, which I attended for the second straight year. (Two quick takeaways from Lolla '18 -- rock music attendance is in the minority, and the young kids enjoy wearing basketball jerseys of varying vintages. And I'm old as fuck.) So to make up for my absence at the TCFF, I decided that yesterday would be my own TCFF in miniature, so I went to three movies back to back to back. I walked into a darkened theater at 3:30pm, and essentially didn't leave until just before 11pm. And thankfully, I was able to see three pretty wonderful movies, each wonderful for different reasons. You should see them if you haven't already. The troika of cinematic joy is as follows, with trailers to click on should you so desire: Mission Impossible: Fallout Rare is the...

Many -- many, so many -- years ago at North Central Michigan College, my classes were relatively full, and I could teach a Humanities class on the films of Stanley Kubrick or the history of rock 'n' roll or Stephen King books & movies and have no worries about enrollments. But over the past half-decade or so, it seems that everything at NCMC is either shifting or eroding, with fewer students and a restricted panorama of course offerings, and I feel powerless to stop the evaporation. Granted, I'm certain that my appeal as a professor is diminishing -- I'm almost 48 (or three decades older than the age of my average student), and my presentation style of aggressive cynicism seems to connect with fewer and fewer folks -- and while I could shake some things up in the personality department w/r/t surface acting in the class room, I'm not sure that's realistic, as the landmark judicial case of Old Dogs v. New Tricks proved in 1996. But what else could be a maj...