Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity, and the Poor on Los Angeles’ Skid Row Book Review

Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity, and the Poor on Los Angeles’ Skid Row By Jeff Dietrich 418 pages, Marymount Institute Press, $29.95 If you are wandering in the 50-block area known as Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles and you ask directions to Hospitality Kitchen or where the Catholic Workers serve meals to the homeless, [...]

Eat Pray Love … Alas

Let’s face it. There are some books that should never be made into movies. Eat Pray Love, by Elizabeth “Liz” Gilbert, my favorite book of 2008, is one of these. I wanted to like the film, but got an inkling it might not live up to my expectations when I saw Julia Roberts, who plays [...]

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on the Making of FITZCARRALDO by Werner Herzog

A funny thing happened on the way to LAX last Friday. I will admit to never having seen “Fitzcarraldo”. But I was thoroughly rivited by the NPR interview with the film’s director-dreamer Werner Herzog  that I listened to on the way to the airport to collect Frank Frost who was arriving for the National Film Retreat: NPR: Werner [...]

Grace & Grotesque: Flannery O’Connor on the page and screen

  AMERICA magazine ran an excellent article on the American Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor in their June 22, 2009 issue. Here is a link to it: Grace and Grotesque: Flannery O\’Connor on the page and screen by Jon M. Sweeney. Sweeney quotes a Nigerian priest who is a writer as well: ““I’m fascinated” he said, [...]