A look back at the 2020-21 NCAA basketball season for the Stanford Cardinal women's team. COVID issues in Santa Clara sent the team on the road for nine weeks, featuring six states, 12 flights and an eventual PAC-12 tournament championship. The 31-2, No. 1- ranked Cardinal, led by head coach Tara VanDerveer, went on to win the NCAA Division I Women's Basketball Tournament over Arizona.
One of the reasons I love watching movies is that, much like books, they serve as windows into other times and different places. Productions from around the world offer valuable insights into the history and culture of their respective countries. And just like literature, cinema can help us understand the present by showing us the past.
Two movies that do a fantastic job in conveying the ongoing struggle for racial justice are Selma (2014) and Just Mercy (2019).
The Roses is a wickedly sharp marital warfare comedy that transforms domestic dysfunction into high art. Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch deliver powerhouse performances as a couple whose fairy-tale romance implodes when his architectural career collapses just as her culinary empire takes off. What makes Jay Roach's remake so devastatingly effective is its refusal to pick sides—both spouses are equally sympathetic and monstrous, wielding Tony McNamara's razor-sharp dialogue like weapons forged from shared intimacies. It's a film that dares you to laugh at relationship wreckage while forcing you to confront the uncomfortable truth that the line between passionate love and mutual destruction is terrifyingly thin.
When it comes the horror genre, I am VERY hard to please or impress, much less scare. Coming from a current mindset of appreciation for chilling, unsettling, tension-inducing efforts such as "Hereditary", "The Conjuring" (ONLY the first one to date, mind you), "Lights Out", "The Babadook", "Midsommar", "Talk To Me", "Oddity", "Bring Her Back", and the like
“Reboot” can be crass and has much room to improve, but with investments of time and care, could flower out of the seed of a vision.
Writing great villains is about striking a balance between charming and evil, so we love them but also love to see them lose.
