An e-mail from an old friend, the filmmaker John Hanson, came out of the blue Wednesday, the day before the newspapers all said we were going to have a northern lights display tonight. The front page headline in the Bismarck Tribune on Wednesday blared “Solar storm to create Northern Lights.” Whoa. Not so fast. The correction at the bottom of …
Dorette and I love to attend the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival every spring. On Thursday, we saw the new Russian-made movie “Vronsky,” complete with English subtitles. The flick is set in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. It imagines the aftermath of Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina” from the point of view of Anna’s lover, Count Vronsky, several years after …
Five years ago came the news that my memoir, “I’m Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers,” was going to be a major motion picture. Two young screenwriters, Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue, had developed a beautiful script. The directors of the movie “Little Miss Sunshine” had signed on. There was significant buzz in Hollywood and in the Madigan household. …
Meryl Streep just picked up another Academy Award nomination this week, her 89th. Something like that. This time it’s for her role as Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham in The Post. Tom Hanks, who plays the Post’s editor, Ben Bradlee, was snubbed, as they say. The story revolves around the newspaper’s publication of the Pentagon papers, classified documents detailing U.S. …
The Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival is under way, with more than 350 movies being shown over 16 days at several venues. If I could do it over, I’d work in the movie industry as a writer or technical professional. I still recall a movie I saw as a North Dakota farm kid, “The Bridges at Toko-Ri,” starring William …