Stars and stuff on the silver screen.
An angel came down from heaven and give me twenty dollars, so I rolled my bones out to the picture show. My plan was to see the evening screening of The Dark Knight Rises, perpetual Batman mark that I am, but I had plenty of time to kill before it started, …
The use of violence is not only one of the most powerful conundrums not only in fiction, but in life. In art, the most problematic aspect of violence is that it is often used as a framework for threat and action, designed to bring viewers into a story who might …
Goodness knows who I am disappointing in this matter, but The Hunger Games is probably the best blockbuster film I’ve seen in years. Which isn’t, unfortunately, to say it’s a great movie. It suffers from a lot of the same problems all blockbusters do, and as is the case with all …
Comic books, it is safe to say, made me who I am today. Though I was an unusually literate child, reading above my grade level practically from the time I learned to read, I never enjoyed anything as much as I did superhero comics. I devoured them from my early …
Born: 1969. The book: 1921. The movie: 1946. The music: 1984. The moment: 1871. The look: 1988. The food: 1929. The drink: 1825. The car: 1974. The drive: 1934. The show: 2002. The obsession: 1939. The game: 2000. The country: 1776. The dream: 1968. The art: 1884. The leader: 1932. …
Whenever I write about politics, someone I know — often it’s a well-meaning friend of largely the same liberal temperament as myself — will scold me about being an idealist. We are, after all, discussing “the art of the possible”, and it does no good to refuse to face up …
Jose Ortega y Gasset called the metaphor “the most fertile power possessed by mankind”. He compared its potential to reshape the world to that of magic, a divine implement somehow handed down to mere humanity. Indeed, one could argue that the metaphor is humanity; it combines two of our most unique …
1. Highly controversial choice meant to enrage readers, thus drawing lots of links and hits 2. Conventional but ‘artsy’ choice to prove aesthetic credentials 3. Completely ordinary choice that is actually the thing you like best, but you put it third so as not to seem obvious 4. Another completely …
“All right, let’s move on to Action Item #7.” “Why must we call them that? This is all talk. No action.” “It’s just a phrase, mighty Genghis. It is meant to remind us that these items under discussion are meant to be acted upon immediately rather than tabled.” “What table? …
As soon as we see Edward G. Robinson in The Woman in the Window, we know there’s going to be trouble. He’ a professor of psychology (a fact that is helpfully driven home by the name “SIGMUND FREUD” on the chalkboard behind him, even though nothing he’s saying has anything …
I first met the Zodiac Killer in the fall of 1970 at a dinner party given for him by Grace Malley and her husband, Yezny Finkelblatt, head of Motion Picture Studio’s security cameras deivision. My wife of the moment, Corrida Mexia, was seated next to a lovely young co-ed who …
“I’m not going on about any law. You’re no good, is all.” (Cristi) True irony is a very difficult thing to pull off in cinema. Literature allows an artist the freedom to draw out language in order to create and sustain the proper atmosphere for the gap between what is …
It continues to amaze me every day how completely and thoroughly we fail to understand our own culture. It’s especially baffling considering that this country, really, only has pop culture going for it; having given up on the Supermanly troika of truth, justice, and the American Way, and having shipped …
There seems to be an audience that demands everything be explained to them; that everything be easy. And I don’t think that’s doing us any good as a culture. The ease with which we can accomplish or conjure any possible scenario imaginable through CGI is almost directly proportionate to how …
“Walk in my footsteps. It’ll be easier.” François Truffaut’s conundrum about the impossibility of making an anti-war film has been reheated and turned over until it’s become inedible; a fresher tidbit for us to chew on is how national cinemas portray war based on their own experiences of it. In …
