If you have just one white liberal friend on Facebook, you’ve already seen the image that says while Hillary Rodham was campaigning for Barry Goldwater, Bernie Sanders was a significant activist in the Civil Rights movement, marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. For these same white liberals, it is inconceivable that Bernie Sanders should be… Read More Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders
In August 2001, my family and I visited the Statue of Liberty. It was a deeply influential day in my life, mostly because I was very interested in Americana at that point in my life. History interested me, and the symbols of America (such as they were in the eyes of a white boy) were… Read More Arthur S7E10, “April 9th”
Dir. Ron Howard. Starring Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Matthew Macfadyen Howard Zinn is probably the most important historian that the United States has ever produced. (Sorry, Charles Beard. I love you too.) Regardless of how you feel about him – in other words, regardless of whether or not you think “historical revisionism” is an honest… Read More Frost/Nixon (2008)
Matt and I, in this newest podcast, take on a topic which we are intimately familiar with and which we have spent virtually no time on in these podcasts: books. In what we hope will become a recurring subject, we talk about some books that we’ve read recently and talk about what interested us in… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 8: Author Cheese Wheel
While Glee was premiering on Fox in the fall of 2009, NBC was airing a new comedy of its own. Unlike Glee, an hour-long program which pretended to be comedy but which ended up plowing for drama and reaping awkward silences, Community was a half-hour program which knew it was funny and aspired to become… Read More Community S1E21, “Contemporary American Poultry”
Matt and I return to the wide world of sports in our latest podcast. We share the highlights of an NBA fantasy draft. Find out why, in this universe, there is hope for the Charlotte Hornets, no hope for the Sacramento Kings, and why neither one of us drafted Kobe Bryant. If you want to… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 7: Why the Sacramento Kings Will Be Terrible Forever, and Other Results of an NBA Fantasy Draft
Dir. James Bridges. Starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas Spoilers for The China Syndrome abound below. Usually I wouldn’t include a spoiler alert for a movie that’s more than thirty years old, but the film is fairly taut, and knowing too much about it would detract from the viewing experience. It’s Los Angeles in… Read More The China Syndrome (1979)
Dir. Robert Redford. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Rob Morrow, John Turturro About an hour or so into Quiz Show, I found myself…not bored, exactly, but struggling from an almost oppressive dose of formula. About an hour and five minutes into Quiz Show, I wondered if that was necessarily the movie’s fault. After all, most of the… Read More Quiz Show (1994)
Dir. Warren Beatty. Starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson When I first started this blog, one of the categories I knew I wanted to include was “Losing Steam,” for movies that began with a rush, reach a fabulous climax, and then peter out for one reason or another. Two movies immediately came to mind… Read More Reds (1981)
(Link to the song here) In just about every musical that wants to be one, there is a song that comes on late in the show and is made to make you hurt a little. Not everyone has to agree on the song in question – in Miss Saigon, is that song Kim’s last lullaby… Read More “The I Love You Song,” from The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005)
Seeing Things Secondhand 