Dante A. Ciampaglia

Carson Lund on his new baseball movie “Eephus”

“Baseball isn’t statistics,” legendary New York sports columnist Jimmy Cannon once wrote. “Baseball is DiMaggio rounding second.” I wonder if Tim Bassett, second baseman for Adler’s Paints, had that in mind when he quipped, decades later, “Is there anything more beautiful than the sun setting on a fat man stealing second base?” It’s entirely possible. […]

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FILM: Documentary “Veselka” Celebrates Food, Community, and the Unbreakable Ukrainian Spirit

About 35 minutes into Michael Fiore’s documentary Veselka: The Rainbow On the Corner at the Center of the World, Ukrainian members of the restaurant staff hustle to get food to customers. As they do, they talk about their boss, Veselka owner Jason Birchard, and his ability to communicate in their language. When Fiore asks one

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Back to “Brighton Beach” with Filmmakers Carol Stein and Susan Wittenberg,
by Dante A. Ciampaglia

Author Nelson Algren wrote in 1951 about Chicago that, “once you’ve come to this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” That sentiment could also apply to the Brighton Beach neighborhood filmmakers Carol Stein and Susan

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by Dante A. Ciampaglia Read More »

The Year I Fell Back In Love with Cinema, in 10 Moviegoing Experiences, by Dante A. Ciampaglia

It was in September, sitting in the big auditorium at BAM, packed with people, watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi masterpiece Solaris. Near the beginning of the film is a shot of rain dropping into a pond, the water rippling out into green shards of wetland flora — nothing special, necessarily, but the kind of pastoral

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