August 16, 2021
That Time the Taliban Chased Me Out of Town
James Killough's life was shattered by the Taliban over thirty years ago. What is happening now at Kabul Airport brings it all back vividly....
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April 29, 2014
Hate Is a Drug
I live in an area of West Hollywood that is on the hill well above the three blocks of back-to-back gay bars known as the ‘Fruit Loop’, a block below the super-straight Sunset Strip — infamous rocker lounge The Viper Room abuts my corner store. The residents make an eclectic demographic. On the corner of my street and Palm Avenue is an ugly mid-century apartment building, elderly housing for Russians. The cheap fabrics and sad bric-a-brac in the windows give it the appearance of those dwellings beloved by photojournalists who snap willfully dreary reportages of the faces of Chernobyl twenty years after the nuclear meltdown. Across from that indifferent edifice is a wee compound
January 6, 2014
With the Success of ‘Dhoom 3,’ Should Hollywood Learn from Bollywood?
Other than switching cigarette brands from Marlboro Medium to Special Blend 27 for a richer, smoother smoking experience, my only New Year’s resolution is to forgo clickbait. I will no longer be enticed by HuffPo to find out what Sandra Bullock found out after she Googled herself. I refuse to be shocked by what fashion editors have photoshopped off a celebrity’s body. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to entice readers myself
January 24, 2012
Time for Your Meds, Oscar
THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES
by James Killough @James_Killough
Since I started living with a psychic medium, I’ve been reminded that there is no such thing as coincidence. It’s all synchronicity: everything has a reason, a purpose, a place in the Great Algorithm of Existence, which is why it cannot be mere coincidence that the Academy Award nominations came out during Mental Health Awareness Week.
If you have any doubts about the mystical Order of Things in the Universe, I invite you to screen Tree of Life, the subject of one of my reviews from last year that I had a good chuckle writing. Despite the fact it isn’t properly speaking a narrative film because it entirely discards every Aristotelian principle of dramatic form, TOL was not only given a Best Picture nod, it also received one for Best Director, Terrence Malick.