Channing Pomeroy

Following Follow Follows you

“When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life.”
-- John Kennedy Toole, from A Confederacy of Dunces

Sometimes Istanbul, sometimes Moscow, sometimes Atlanta, lately the Arabian peninsula, often on a plane between them.

Favorite films

All

Belushi 2020

★★½ Watched by Channing Pomeroy 04 May 2021

This documentary proved again that there are few things less funny describing why something is funny. Still it was wonderful nostalgia for the funniest parts of my junior high and high school years. He really was a supernova.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring 2001

★★★★★ Rewatched by Channing Pomeroy 23 Apr 2021 1

I saw The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring once again on the big screen. Can it really be 20 years ago? I saw it first just a few weeks after 9/11. Galadriel’s words struck hard, “For the world has grown full of peril, and in all lands, love is now mingled with grief.” I feared for my two toddlers and the Shire-like world in which they’d been born in where I’d grown up reading The Lord…

Psycho 1960

★★★★★ Rewatched by Channing Pomeroy 16 May 2020 6

About 40 minutes into Psycho, Norman removes a print hanging on his wall of “Susannah and the Elders,” a story from the Book of Daniel of two men spying on a naked bathing woman. Norman then spies through a peephole at Marion undressing to bathe. There’s an extreme close-up of his eye in the darkness lit by a beam of light from the peephole. Here we have the ultimate metaphor for moviegoing, the audience-as-voyeur, sitting in the dark spying on…
Da 5 Bloods 2020

★★★★ Watched by Channing Pomeroy 12 Jun 2020 6

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
― Flannery O'Connor
Spike Lee’s fine genre pictures (25th Hour, Inside Man) are masterclasses in finesse and unsurpassed…