The Hollywood Reporter recently published a Todd McCarthy article wondering, basically, about sequel fatigue. The summer, he notes, movies like Transformers: The Last Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Cars 3 have each sputtered at the American box office. This is our fifth Transformers movie since 2007, our fifth Pirates movie since 2003, and… Read More The American Blockbuster Bubble
Dir. Brad Bird. Starring Patton Oswalt, Lou Romano, Janeane Garofolo Up until 2007, here’s how Pixar movies had ended: Toy Story – Woody and Buzz chase down a moving truck on an RC car, fall with style into a minivan, and then have their first Christmas together A Bug’s Life – After the gruesome death of… Read More Ratatouille (2007)
Occasionally I try to come up with a contemporary parallel to show how bizarre it was that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a fairly well-known actor from a famous family. That’s something which is lost from history classes, and which it’s worth at least bouncing around. The best example I’ve come up with is if Kiether… Read More The People vs. O.J. Simpson (2016) and O.J.: Made in America (2016)
The airing of the Hamildoc on PBS (which is only available until mid-November! If you haven’t watched it, hurry!) a few nights ago was received with the kind of joy which you’d expect. I was a little surprised at how much it aligned with the Hamiltome, and I was more than a little surprised at… Read More Race, Slavery, and Colonial Era Musicals
Dir. Ava DuVernay. Starring Michelle Alexander, Van Jones, Angela Davis When was the first time you were ashamed to be an American? I don’t just mean hurt, or looked askance, or felt a trigger of anxiety in your gut, but I mean just honest-to-goodness shame, the kind that horrifies you and makes you so angry you… Read More 13th (2016)
Jesus (as Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit tells us) shown everything off balance. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the Misfit expands on that hypothesis in his own personal testimony. I’ve found myself running that sentence, along with a close counterpart from just later in the story – “Does it seem right to you, lady,… Read More Everything Off Balance
Depending on who you are, Donald Trump proved his seriousness as a candidate as long ago as last summer, although I think many of us came to it later than that. For me, it was back in February when Donald Trump handily won the Republican primary in South Carolina. My thoughts on what signaled the… Read More Re: Unraveling the Trump Phenomenon
It’s Sunday. Let’s begin with a parable. Paul de Man was one of the foremost deconstructionists of the 1960s and ’70s, a friend of Jacques Derrida’s and a partner in tearing down the traditional bulwarks of philosophy. De Man died of old age in 1983, only about a year before Foucault succumbed to AIDS-related complications.… Read More Let’s Stop Defending Trump, Please
We may have known, thanks to pundits and pollsters, that Donald Trump would win South Carolina’s Republican primary, and perhaps handily. It doesn’t make the night of and the days immediately after feel any less like a movie. One of the best scenes in Malcolm X, for my money, is the one where Malcolm stands… Read More Unraveling the Trump Phenomenon
Cursory glances at America during the second half of its century evince a clear and depressing pattern: small moments of sunlight, of genuine progress, are outweighed by massive, costly, counterrevolutionary actions. An idealistic, forward-thinking president was gunned down before being able to do more than draw blueprints. Freedom Summer was followed by the assassinations of… Read More Cynical Expectations of Government
Seeing Things Secondhand 