On the second leg of our Florida Keys fling, the Brawny Sherpa and I head from Key Biscayne over to Key Largo, where we stay in a one-bedroom duplex at the oddly named Key West Inn at Key Largo where we inevitably wonder whether there is a Key Largo Inn at Key West. Our plans…
Category: Films
Tis the Season for Reflection
Another year, not enough travel! I’d hit the road all the time if my checkbook would let me. But I am grateful for all of the places I have been so far and to have goals about where I want to go in the future. For the present, I am grateful to be able to…
What We Used to Think of Paris, and Women
Get a few glimpses of 1960s Paris—and New York—in A New Kind of Love, starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward playing, respectively, a ‘newspaper man’ and a career-gal fashion designer who meet not-so-cute on a plane headed toward France. Newman’s character, a boozing, womanizing charmer with an ironclad contract (did those ever really exist for…
Want to Visit Old Penn Station? Watch 1942’s ‘The Palm Beach Story’
I picked up a copy of the 1942 film The Palm Beach Story, starring Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea, hoping to see some of old Florida, but I got something better instead: a view of the original Penn Station in Manhattan. I’d always heard that the Beaux Arts station, built in 1910 but bulldozed in…
Adventuring “In July,” in October, Infinitely
I watched the 2000 German film, In July (Im Juli), again, hoping to catch scenes of Hamburg. I’d first watched the movie long before I thought about going to Hamburg, or went to Hamburg, and didn’t remember how much of Hamburg was showcased. A cute love story about taking risks and going on an adventure…
Visit Versailles via ‘Farewell, My Queen’
Does anyone understand Marie Antoinette? How someone, anyone, the queen of France could be so entirely oblivious about what was going on all around her entirely befuddles me. Every time I make excuses for her—she was too young for her role, her husband was supposed to be in charge—I can’t help but think of another…
Watch the Latest Anna Karenina for the Mood, Not the Views
The 2012 version of Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law as Anna and Karenin, features plenty of Russian darkness and bad behavior but not as many images of Russia as I would have liked. For those planning to visit Russia, the film is still worth a watch; what it lacks in actual Russian…
The Oblivious Queens of Versailles
Visiting Versailles, the palace of French kings, and the Conciergerie, the prison where Queen Marie Antoinette spent her last days, one can’t help but wonder, How could it possibly have ended like this? Elements of the story do make sense: the queen seemed largely unschooled, her spouse weak, her home far removed from any squalor….
What I Learned at Doctor Zhivago’s Revolution
It took me a half a dozen tries to get all the way through the three-hour-long 1965 film Doctor Zhivago, a love story set amid the backdrop of the Russian revolution but filmed elsewhere. Starring Omar Sharif as a doctor-poet, and Julie Christie as an unconvincing 17-year-old raped by her mother’s love interest, a member…