🏘 Midtown is Memphis. 🎶 📚 Librarian to the kids. 📽 Film. 🎷Music. 🐕🦺 Animals. 📖 Books. 🎸Bruce.
Memphis
Joined July 2012
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Jan L. Willis retweeted
Barry Keoghan earned himself an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for The Banshees of Inisherin & it’s what I believe to be his best performance. This is the role/performance from Keoghan that really caught my attention. I think he’s one of the most talented actors of my generation & I’m extremely hopeful that he will eventually win an Oscar in the next few years.
Jan L. Willis retweeted
El maestro Sir #AlecGuinness cuenta cómo descubrió un detalle muy personal de su actuación en la magistral #ElPuenteSobreElRíoKwai, tras verse a sí mismo en la pantalla 🙌🏻
#MichaelParkinson
Jan L. Willis retweeted
enormously famous & wealthy in his time, London died relatively young, possibly of a drug overdose (after heavy drinking, substance abuse). eerily parallels the death of Elvis Presley.
reading, for the first time, Jack London's autobiographical novel of 1909, "Martin Eden." much impressed with the passionate sincerity of London's prose & vividly rendered scenes.
the recent independent film "Jack London's 'Martin Eden'") encouraged me to read this more or less forgotten novel; the film is excellent, beautifully adapted from the novel though it ends a bit abruptly.
how America devours its celebrities!--for all his awareness of society's hypocrisy & his unflinching confrontation of the "primitive" in civilization still London was undone by his own wealth & fame. (London was the bestselling novelist of his time, enormously wealthy within a few years of being penniless.)
Jan L. Willis retweeted
With the late, great Oliver Reed currently wowing 2026 audiences all over again with his incredible performance in the restored version of Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’, I wanted to share this amazing clip of him from 1985.
The rather low-res clip comes from ‘In at the Deep End’, a BBC series in which presenter Paul Heiney tries his hands at a profession he had zero experience in. For this episode, Heiney was preparing for an acting role opposite Michael Caine in ‘Water’ and went to Oliver Reed for some pointers on how to play a villain.
Please enjoy what happens next.
Jan L. Willis retweeted
Scorsese called The Changeling one of the scariest horror films ever; Guillermo del Toro says it's a masterpiece.
Unlike other ghost stories, George C. Scott doesn't run; he actively helps a frightened spirit find justice in a supernatural whodunit. Smart movie.
Jan L. Willis retweeted
Costa de creure que hagin passat ja 24 anys. Algú us dirà que no és possible que una vida canviï per un concert de música. Jo us diré que i tant que sí. #LivingProof #Mesqueunconcert #Barcelona2002 #TheNeverendingThread youtu.be/jlWqXoMD5oA?is=8HcP…
Jan L. Willis retweeted
On this day in 1893, Lillian Gish was born in Springfield, OH. I asked her if actors in silent films had a script with dialogue to memorize or if they were just given a general idea of what was being said in the scene and they ad-libbed the words. This was her remarkable reply:
Jan L. Willis retweeted
No one painted water like Frits Thaulow.
Just look at the river in this painting: it feels like it’s really moving, catching the light and swallowing it at the same time. He painted it in 1892 and called it Water Mill, a picture that does the hardest thing in all of art… it makes water look alive.
What made him so extraordinary is that he could paint several kinds of water at once: the pale reflections of the buildings on the surface, the green tint of the water itself, the ripples running across the top, and the rocks sitting on the bottom, all of it layered together, melting into one another the way real water actually does.
Most painters can manage one of those things. He gave you all four in a single glance.
Thaulow was Norwegian, born in 1847, and he grew up in a country made of fjords, rivers and waterfalls, and he chose to spend his life on the single hardest subject a painter can attempt, the one thing that will not sit still and will not hold a shape. And in doing so, he made the fleeting beauty of water eternal...
Jan L. Willis retweeted
Cut 3, filmed at Philadelphia’s Xfinity Mobile Arena on May 30, 2026, finally dropped today.
Over the years, “Land of Hope and Dreams” has become an absolute powerhouse on stage. Bruce has elevated it to the same stature as “Born to Run.”
If “Born to Run” is New Jersey’s unofficial anthem, “Land of Hope and Dreams” is the anthem of the America we still believe in.
Jan L. Willis retweeted
Why do you think the dozens of hateful comments I got about my 3 1/2 star review of the Musk documentary stopped as soon as Ukraine destroyed the Russian bot servers? Hmmmm. rogerebert.com/reviews/elon-…
Jan L. Willis retweeted
This is a great place to start, but I must also plug @mediahistorydl. They've digitized millions of pages of classical Hollywood + broadcasting ephemera. I've been using it for over a decade, and every historian I know counts it as an essential resource.
mediahistoryproject.org/
Jan L. Willis retweeted
Monet painted The Magpie at 28.
Young, penniless, and unknown, he stood outdoors for hours in sub-zero temperatures.
The Paris Salon rejected it as a failure.
Today, it hangs in the Musée d’Orsay as a masterpiece.
Jan L. Willis retweeted
A marvelous scene that defined a marvelous, still relevant film. I saw her speak in a Hitchcock course at USC in the mid-1980s, and she provided a lot of insight concerning "Waterfront" writer-dirctor Elia Kazan as well as Hitchcock who she worked with in "North By Northwest."
