Chestbursters vs. Engineers
Like many, I found the sequence in which the new Ripley “hacks” a sexist computer to give herself an abortion to be the best and truest to form. The...
Category: movies & television
Mad Men 2013
About 15 years ago I saw Tyler Brule, then just two years into Wallpaper, give a presentation that would forever change my understanding of art and commerce. He...
actor and spectator
in the actor-spectator relationship, both participants experience self-knowledge by “trading places” with another person. for the actor, self-knowle...
the vessel of exploration
For Europeans and their former subjects, the making of planet Earth – a process better known as globalization – begins after the Renaissance, as newly empowered...
Blue Valentine: the love story as murder mystery
Surely, for every lover who says “I love you” (which is to ask “Do you love me?”) there is another who asks “What went wrong?̶...
The movie Return: wanting for a story.
In the vein of Todd Haynes and Tony Kushner, Liza Johnson’s movie Return dramatizes an intimate, personal crisis to make intelligible a broader social cat...
What if the movie Contagion were about viruses rather than globalization?
Soderbergh’s Contagion is a movie about the ills of globalization, right down to the ridiculous closing sequence in which deforestation by a multinational...
My problem with Footloose (2011): not enough Mexicans
Footloose (1984) had tension because it was of the moment. The Moral Majority was just entering its apex and small town America was a pop cultural phenomenon (m...
Heavy makeup
In the recent movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, an actor in heavy computerized makeup helps play out a familiar father-son drama. Fiction is often deeply mo...
Is literalism a faith? The problem with wizards and vampires.
Perhaps the reason why literalists have fretted over the popularity of books like Harry Potter and movies like Twilight is not that they fear children will lear...
“It has absolutely no meaning.” Yet.
“There’s nothing intelligent in Alien. It has absolutely no meaning. It works on a very visceral level and its only point is terror and more terror....
living in the age of digital singles, what of digital shorts?
Computers have transformed music production and consumption by enabling the cheap and easy manipulation of sound. Digitization took apart music culture (industr...
Bad action movie plot: Chinese hackers and Mexican cartels
The Vanity Fair expose on likely Chinese hacking of many important corporations and government agencies by Michael Joseph Gross describes a ploy I’d only ...
Why thrillers set in space can be more vivid than those set on Earth.
I came of age at a time when outer space was a potent symbol in popular culture. This quote from an interview with historian Nicholas de Monchaux sheds light on...
The agony of success: Kings of Pastry and The Pixar Story
The ancient Greeks defined
What’s so vulgar about The Hangover? Not nearly enough.
I remember exactly where I was when I read the obituary for the music industry on the front page of the Wall Street Journal: it was a gray and cold morning in M...
What Would Carlos Do?
The movie series Carlos is a must-see thriller for anyone born in the last half-century. It fits neatly alongside other chronicles of political terror like Muni...
art/business/design/ideas/journalism/language/latin america/mental illness/movies & television/music/nature/people/play/power/technology/work
About a year of tweets, archived here for posterity.
I began this current journal, XSML, with the intent of reducing my own notes to extra small, XML-friendly updates. Increasingly, I have been drawn by the allure...
Blind spots. The funny and deeply scary movie “Happy Go Lucky”.
Imagine you are searching for your reading glasses only to find them sitting atop your head – or, perhaps worse, discovering that you are already wearing them. ...
Reading Matt Taibbi’s excellent “The Crying Shame of John Boehner”
From Matt Taibbi’s tour de force portrait of John Boehner as a shill for highest bidder: “He cries sometimes when we’re having a debate on bil...