Alexander Stuart

Finally saw Frozen last night. We all loved it - but loved the 3D Mickey Mouse short even more!  It was particularly interesting as our nine year old son Hudson and five year old daughter Paradise love watching the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, Steamboat Willie (the first ever sound cartoon released - in 1928 - and the first Mickey distributed, though the third one made) and Plane Crazy (the first Mickey short, made as a silent but released after Steamboat Willie with a soundtrack added).  That they watch these early classics of animation on an iPhone or iPad seems apt, since Disney was such an incredible visionary and lover of new technology.  The new Mickey, Get A Horse, seems vintage...but it's not. All kudos to director Lauren MacMullen for creating a fabulously entertaining and technically stunning "new-old" classic.  Read on: The full article is at:  http://www.babble.com/disney/walt-disney-returns-as-mickey-mouse-in-new-disney-short-get-a-horse/ Read more about S

A few days in the Keys, and some of the most primal light I have seen. A wonderful time staying with friends to research a project - and rain that would do a hurricane justice! All photographs Copyright 2014 Alexander Chow-Stuart. 

Happy New Year (to those of you for whom it will be a new year) and warmest wishes to all who have sent me holiday greetings. I'm enjoying some intensive family time and cannot reply individually, but please enjoy the season, enjoy the moment that is forever constant and forever changing, be peaceful and loving in your hearts, take time to think of the smallest creature and the most ignored person, and live 2014 with a passion for everyone and everything. Peace, love, infinite oneness. And cake :) (Photograph Copyright 2013 by Alexander Chow-Stuart)

American Hustle is my film of the year because it's a magnificent, warm, funny, outrageous, quirky, affirming celebration of life – and, ultimately, love. In a year when American cinema in particular seems obsessed with lone figures surviving – Gravity (the most undeniably cinematic of the loner/end of empire canon); Captain Phillips; All Is Lost; Spike Jonze's reflections in Her on our increasingly overwhelming relationships with technology (that or his breakup with Sofia Coppola); Inside Llewyn Davis (more like a struggle to endure an overdrawn underworld myth) – it's incredibly refreshing to see David O Russell choreographing such a beautifully judged, inclusive and loving ensemble film as American Hustle. From its unforgettable opening with the World's Greatest Combover (and a sweeping Duke Ellington track, Jeep’s Blues ), to its extraordinary, thrillingly cinematic highlights – such as the coming together of opposing forces ("I know who you are

Please buy the book at your local bookstore if you can - or from Allie Brosh's blog! There are many gifts you can give this holiday season, but my pick is a warmly colored book of highly idiosyncratic cartoons, Hyperbole And A Half , by Allie Brosh, whose autobiographical blog of the same name has featured on this blog at least a couple of times in the past. Brosh, who appears in the cartoons as a funny squiggly creature with big eyes and stick limbs, examines her life with enormous honesty and humor, ranging from everyday situations that we all recognize to poignant childhood memories and an exploration of her devastating experience of serious depression. Allie Brosh: "It's me on the inside." In an interview with Terry Gross for NPR's Fresh Air , Brosh explained how she came to draw herself as a strange tube-like being with a pointy triangle for a ponytail: "The reason I draw myself this way is that I feel that this absurd squiggly thin