Dir. William Wyler. Starring Fredric March, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews In 1979, Jimmy Carter gave a speech that, in my mind, ranks with George Washington’s Farewell Address or Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural as one of the most important in the history of the American executive. The “Crisis of Confidence” speech speaks to a statistic that… Read More The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Dir. J.J. Abrams. Starring Daisy Ridley, Harrison Ford, Adam Driver This is absolutely riddled with spoilers. If you want a review without spoilers, this is not the one you’re looking for. Let’s get this out of the way. The Force Awakens is a good movie. It is not a great movie, but it is significantly… Read More Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens
This was always the tricky double feature of this exercise, and, once I decided that I wasn’t going to watch all six of these movies in one sitting, it was actually the reason I didn’t really want to do three back-to-back viewings. Doing Episodes I and II together made sense, even if it’s a nasty… Read More Star Wars I-VI Project: Episodes III-IV
When I used to teach The Crucible, I would inevitably have at least one student who was aghast that John Proctor let himself be taken into custody at the end of Act 3 when he knew that he would be executed. “I’d never let that happen to me,” the kid, who is almost always a… Read More Brief Thoughts on Firearms in America
Seeing Things Secondhand 