About a month ago, the scuttlebutt around the Motion Picture Home was that "'the champagne was on ice," as the saviors of motion picture industry long-term care were about to reveal themselves.

Our appetite for a solution had been whet by yet another promise that came on the heels of the dashed hopes of a Providence-UCLA partnership. This one a promise that held more promise than the previous promise. Once again the crack MPTF wordmongers were spinning hope into an emptiness that has become palpable and all too familiar.

Are we to understand that no news is no news, or that no news is bad news?

The residents have suffered through a lot. Those who remain in the all but
emptied long-term care facility go about their daily routines, blessedly unaware of
how those who control their industry has failed them. The...

I'm not a film reviewer, and this isn't going to be a review. However, as art is a catalyst to expand your consciousness and find relevance in your world -- where it may have not occurred before -- then with “Hugo,” Martin Scorsese has created a celluloid Pieta that's showing on screens across the country. I'm still basking in the afterglow of this work.

My kid mentioned last night at Thanksgiving that he wanted to take me to see it.  The last time he took me to see a film, it was after witnessing his old man's near emotional breakdown after viewing a DVD of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.”

"Hey Dad, how would you like to see some Nazis get their asses kicked?" he asked paternally as he put an arm reassuringly around my shoulders. "I would son, I'd like that very much" I...

It was during Yitzkor services that my father came back to me.

My head was bowed in silent prayer with the rest of the congregation. I was laying in his bed, with him. My head was nestled in the crook of his arm. Vin Scully's voice was on the radio. My dad loved to listen to the Dodgers at night, and it was a special time when we both listened together.

I could smell him -- the mixture of nicotine and Scotchguard (he was a furniture salesman), and I vividly remembered the glow of the ember at the end of his cigarette. My father came to me like that as I prayed for his soul, as others were praying for the souls of those that they loved and lost.

My dad ended his life on his terms. He laid down on a gurny as he was prepped for an angiogram. He gave the nurse his car keys, instructed her to give them to my mom, and then...

Gerard Depardieu is my new hero.

I equate him with the lone demonstrator who faced down a squadron of Chinese Type 59 armed tanks in Tiananmen Square, holding nothing but an empty shopping bag. (Editor's note: For those of you who missed it, the actor was thrown off an Air France flight from Paris to Dublin for urniating outside the confines of the restroom.)

Depardieu, in his own way, faced down the culture of corporate greed and control, holding something much more symbolic than an empty shopping bag, albeit equally vacant and non-threatening.   

Depardieu's urgent need to relieve himself is metaphoric to the basic rights and privileges that are denied to many of us.  

It doesn't matter if it's an international airline, a media conglomerate, or the United States Government -- the basic needs that we pay...