Brianland

  I recently stumbled on a Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) interview about Boogie Nights from 1997 and began revisiting of his work. I’ve now seen all of his nine written-&-directed films, most more than once, and he’s certainly up there with the greatest of the active mid-career contemporary filmmakers. Since Boogie Nights he’s been compared […]

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Highlights of Golden Nights    By the laws of physics, taking a trip while you’re on a trip exponentially amplifies the experience. Here’s some of the peaks in the weeks with the freaks . . . The Black Dot “Sometimes you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it […]

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. I’d never given Las Vegas a moment’s thought in my life.  I checked in with some cultural colleagues I’ve been jamming the arts with for 40+ years and none of us can remember the city ever coming up for any reason.  In fact, it was kind of looked down upon as this superficial wasteland […]

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  This is a scene-by-scene breakdown of the Dylan biopic masterpiece A Complete Unknown co-written and directed by James Mangold.  Besides being one of the best living filmmakers, Mangold was undoubtably tapped because of how well he handled the Oscar-winning Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line. After Jeff Rosen and Bob’s management team optioned the […]

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On this weekend 17 years ago — in the heat of the Democratic primary of 2008 between Hillary & Obama — I started BrianHassett.com. Every month since then for 17 years I’ve written at least one new piece for the site. “17” has been a weird number that’s followed me around my whole life from […]

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The Day I Thanked Arthur Miller   One of the nice things about living in Manhattan — you often bump into and sometimes get to talk to really smart people on the sidewalk.  When they’re famous, mostly you just nod acknowledgment and smile — like seeing Robin Williams walking and playing with his son on […]

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  A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man   Here’s what I riffed to social media after I got home from the advance screening on December 18th . . . Caught the sold-out “A Complete Unknown” IMAX screening in Toronto last night — and boy was it GREAT to see it on a […]

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. I was just living in Taylor world for the ten days she was in Toronto doing six sold out stadium shows — something no other artist has ever come close to doing here. Six stadium shows … and you couldn’t get a ticket. Well, you could if you wanted to pay $4000 for one […]

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. The ideas didn’t work, the policies didn’t work, the empathy didn’t work, the life story didn’t work, the billion dollars in fundraising didn’t work, the millions of volunteers didn’t work, the field offices didn’t work, the phone banking didn’t work, the door knocking didn’t work, the huge rallies didn’t work, the inspiring speeches didn’t […]

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Kamala Harris is an Empath — Donald Trump is a Sociopath . One candidate is trying to scare bitter people into voting out of fear and resentment toward the world. The other is appealing to “the better angels of our nature” as Abraham Lincoln so poetically put it 150 years ago. One candidate sees beauty […]

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