Barbara VanDenburgh
Poor, obscure, plain, and little. Writer, critic, comms & events at The Sidney Poitier New American Film School. Former books editor with too many bylines at USA TODAY and The Arizona Republic.
- Just turned into a cartoon wolf hootin’ and hollerin’
- Take me back
- [Not loaded yet]
- [Not loaded yet]
- omfg
- 2025 watch #64: How to Train Your Dragon (2010). First rewatch since release. Put it on at bedtime intending just to vibe a bit, not watch the whole thing, but I was locked in. Such pleasing storytelling with a banger score, and I love its depicting of disability and artificial limbs.
- 2025 watch #65: Strange Days. Ever watch a decades-old film for the 1st time and get *so mad* to have missed out on it all these years? Heart-stoppingly prescient on how social media was gonna cook our brains. Maybe no one's ever been hotter than Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett in this?
- Just realized something extremely unfortunate about myself.
- What's the sexiest performance in a Steven Spielberg movie? Hard mode: What's the sexiest performance by someone who's not a man in a Steven Spielberg movie? He's maybe our most sexless great filmmaker!
- My nominees
- Homer Simpson ass president
- $200 million for on-screen cunnilingus, I think there’s a lesson here for all of us (the lesson is more cunnilingus)
- SINNERS is now the biggest Hollywood original movie of any kind at the box office since 2017 when Pixar's COCO came out. To find a live-action movie that made at least $200M domestic, we have to go back much further. This is truly bananas. www.slashfilm.com/1857902/sinn...
- My favorite book in grade school was ALSO the first book that upset me, which was Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. It's my earliest memory of encountering racism and injustice and it had a profound (and profoundly upsetting) impact.
- Of course it's probably banned now
- I do not have a mom anymore, but I do have this picture of my mom, looking more cool and unbothered than I have ever been in my entire life.
- Extremely rude of my mom to pass down the anxiety genes and not the hotness genes.
- Afraid I’m getting Pope-pilled
- I’m your Huckleberry.
- Tombstone is a 5-star movie the way a Costco hotdog is a 5-star meal. Is it the most sophisticated, no. Does it get the job done every time and put a smile on your face, you bet your ass it does.
- The cuts to NEA grants have hit the Phoenix Film Foundation, which makes possible every year the Phoenix Film Festival, bringing artists from around the world to share and celebrate cinema. If you have some scratch to spare, please consider donating. www.phoenixfilmfestival.com/40in40
- Remember websites?
- [Not loaded yet]
- Maybe I dreamed them.
- [Not loaded yet]
- Yeah, those things. I miss them.
- Ken rocks.
- This sentence should be overturned and the judge should get the boot for embracing manipulative propaganda employing the likeness of a dead man. Every one responsible is materially unfit for the responsibility of upholding justice.
- It is journalistic malpractice to frame this as AI bringing a man "back to life" to deliver an impact statement. He's dead. AI is not magic, it didn't resurrect him, relatives are expressing THEIR wishes with his likeness.
- "It was the first time in Arizona judicial history — and possibly nationwide — that AI has been used to create a deceased victim’s own impact statement" www.abc15.com/news/region-...
- the fundamental disconnect between the manosphere and reality is that they are incapable of understanding that this is - according to every woman I’ve ever met - the sexiest thing a man has ever done
- He hits the hotness trifecta of: 1. Being good at a thing 2. Having a sense of humor 3. Being confident enough in his masculinity to get silly with it Similar psychology behind women going *absolutely feral* over videos of totally ordinary men playing tea party with their nieces. It's so easy!
- You know the rules.
- Nothing matters, have some cleavage.
- [Not loaded yet]
- Truth in advertising
- Since there’s his birthday talk on the timeline, has there ever been a female Orson Welles? I mean that same combination of floridly artistically & intellectually gifted & an absolute unapologetic pain in the ass because of it, lighting up the airwaves politically, declaiming on the talk shows, etc.
- Bette Davis, kinda sorta? Unconventional, trailblazing, a bit weird looking with a screen presence so undeniable it became an asset and not afraid to play ugly on screen, huge pain in the ass, not afraid to talk shit and a delight on talk shows.
- Almost all of Spielberg's bad stuff still has good stuff in it - a good score in 1941, a few well-constructed action sequences in Ready Player One, some whimsical charm in BFG. And then there's Always.
- Ready Player One and Crystal Skull deserve a certain ire, though, for their soulless cynicism. At least Always is earnest in its badness.
- My most toxic trait is that I genuinely think Hook is very good.
- Artificial intelligence when I was a kid
- Playing a game of Civilization and going to war with the United States just to feel something.
- Every day I feel like I’m being kicked in the head by a horse
- Hey quick question, the fuck are we doing?
- There’s nothing old dudes in Payson love more than a fuckin’ leaf blower
- Leaf blowers have been screaming in this Payson cul de sac since 9 a.m., all the old dudes are just taking consecutive turns to maximize my misery.
- [Not loaded yet]
- [Not loaded yet]
- I felt every minute of this movie tick by, my condolences.
- [Not loaded yet]
- 2025 watch #63: The Panic in Needle Park. “I could fix him,” she mutters, watching ‘70s Al Pacino shoot up for the hundredth time.
- On a nice lil’ nature walk, listening to my doom podcasts.
- Been sitting on my copy of Ring Shout for a couple years, waiting for the right mood, and hoooooly shit, it’s as cool as everyone said. And it’s really scratching the itch Sinners left.
- This is tech bro flopsweat desperation to juice engagement from a targeted demographic at the expense of everyone else. The vast majority of people go to the cinema because it ISN'T our living rooms. If they turn the theater into a living room with all a living room's distractions, we'll stay home.
- [Not loaded yet]
- I would live there. Take my phone away forever, give me peace
- It cost me like… $40 to see Sinners in IMAX when you factor in snacks and gas and all that, a price I’m already barely willing to pay and categorically will not if everyone has their iPhones out.
- [Not loaded yet]
- It's in my top 10, rarely a day I don't think about Kirkwood Smith's line-reading of "Bitches, leave."
- I use Facebook for one thing: managing a private group for my book club so folks can stay up-to-date on selections. It's been infiltrated by an AI bot called "Page Pal" I can't find a way to turn off or block (any advice?). Finding pointless catharsis telling the AI bot what I think of its creators
- [Not loaded yet]
- There is no option to turn it off via desktop/browser that I can see. Reddit suggests it’s only possible via the app, which I don’t have.
- Been listening to the Sinners score all day, it’s debilitatingly cool. When shit pops off in the movie, the music turns into this Southern Gothic, haunted house metal-blues hybrid that, much like the movie, is so cool I can’t believe it exists.
- Really putting the panic attack I was flirting with at work over some confusion about some forms into perspective.
