Clever advert for Lifetime femicide of the week movie.
A delightfully clever advert from Lifetime: I can’t decide if the ♀ female sign inside the delete icon kills it or makes it. Also, the “LifetimeR...
Category: movies & television
An idyllic lake setting, a rowboat, Steve Martin, a pretty straw hat, a pink brain in a clear glass jar.
Romancing the brain: The classic psychological-anatomical comedy The Man with Two Brains is available for instant streaming.
If Tron was “Hello World”, Tron: Legacy is goto start.
Daft Punk do an excellent tribute to Vangelis and deserve every flower thrown at their booted feet. Speaking of camp, whoever at Disney is pushing their IP towa...
A Single Man as a double movie.
I had no idea the movie A Single Man was a black comedy, even after reading several reviews. I especially enjoyed the sequence in which the protagonist, George,...
Things I learned from watching the most recent – and only the most recent – Harry Potter movie.
Some movies, indeed some movie series, can be enjoyed starting with the final act on. Harry Potter is not one of them. Movies for kids now use techniques previo...
Why did Congress create a postal service and how did talk radio come about?
Fascinating, brief and polemical history of public media – now mass media – in the U.S., from the postal service to radio then television, etc.
Art capturing life imitating art: Norway and Houston, Taxi Driver and Scarface
A striking parallel from Peter Beste’s celebrated series on Norwegian Black Metal bands and Houston rappers: Archetypes of alienation.
Not all fairy tales are equal: my problem with Twilight.
Ana liked it.* I thought it was bordering on the absurd. A wish fulfillment scenario made for viewers with a very different set of concerns can feel like a fugu...
On watching Blade Runner for the first time in 15 years.
I had forgotten that Blade Runner is a movie about illegal aliens being hunted to death by a cop turned bounty hunter in a Los Angeles abandoned by anyone with ...
The wonderful experimental video Oops and the phenomenology of film.
There are many reasons to love the 10 minute video Oops by Chris Beckman only one of which is that it can serve as a great reference for a discussion of the phe...
Creative destruction: the movie Blind Shaft is a stunning, subtle satire on industrialization in China told as a crime story.
Based on a even more gruesome crime spree that began almost a decade ago, the movie Blind Shaft is a must-see dark satire about two cons who kill hapless migran...
Of buried secrets and the return of the repressed.
In a short review of the new Chinese movie 1428, a reference to a macabre symbol of a massive cover-up: in 2009, the foundations of a concrete plant in Sichuan ...
Want to improve the political climate? Make economics a national pastime.
If the left wants to convince voters the stimulus package was effective, it should focus on teaching Americans basic economic theory. Only then does it stand a ...
Movies about the lives of adolescents.
A few weeks ago I panned the movie Easy A as a teen drag performance and a bad one at that. Using teens and teen scenarios to tell adult stories is not inherent...
Imagining the German thriller The Tunnel as if it were set in Baja California.
It’s hard to believe that I was born at a time when the city of Berlin was divided in the middle by a militarized border wall. The movie The Tunnel goes a...
Teen drag.
We went to see the movie Easy A last night. Casting adults to play the role of teens is nothing new. Neither is writing adult dialogue for teens to recite. (At ...
Right wing frustration over Colbert’s testimony to Congress is the best news I’ve heard this week.
Our society and economy would be much, much better off if debaters, especially on television, were able to call each others’ bluff with the simple use of ...
A massive multiplayer movie experience.
Reading Michael Heilemann’s celebrated investigation of how the character of Chewbacca was crafted, it struck me that movies are multi-player text-based v...
The very dry John Malkovich
GQ revisits the making of GoodFellas: John Malkovich: It sort of came at a bad time in my life, when I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to think ...
Refudiating video adverts: Uncle Sam digging a hole as unhappy girl looks on.
A new video advert shows Uncle Sam digging a hole, deeper and deeper, as a woman with neutral English worries about our national debt. The woman mentions that t...