All Posts By

James Bratt

The Beautiful Changes

Another good thing about retirement is that if your schedule gets screwed up, you don’t have to sweat it so much; most tomorrows are open.

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Confidence Game

by James Bratt Two weeks ago, in his post “Ordinary Dust,” Jason Lief memorably described one of those bad teaching days that every college professor—maybe

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The Rest of Your Life

I’ve just finished the first two weeks of the rest of my life. As a few of you know, and as more of you may

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Casablanca

What makes a movie memorable? So memorable that we can watch it on almost infinite repeat? Well, it has to be of truly unusual quality,

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Doctor Zhivago

For this fourth in a series on the five films I could watch forever, I get to talk about David Lean’s 1965 epic about Russia,

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Godfather I

I first saw The Godfather in May 1972, three months after its release and right on the heels of my first year in grad school.

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Chinatown

Here’s the second installment, gentle reader, in my series on five favorite films—more precisely, five movies that I’ve found worthy of virtually infinite re-viewing, with

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The Big Sleep

A while back I came across one of those on-line teasers: name five movies that you can watch again and again without losing interest. And,

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One Cheer for Civil Religion

I’ve had a long adversarial relationship with American civil religion. It began with all those invocations I heard as a teenager in the mid-‘60s that

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