On Shutter Island, there’s a lighthouse where patients are supposedly taken to be lobotomized. The movie has about thirty-five shots of this lighthouse against a gloomy sky, so many that you begin to wonder if director Martin Scorsese has had…
Posted on: February 21st, 2010 | Comments (40)
For a good time, call Robert Downey Jr. Of course, some people don’t want to have a good time. That’s one of the mysterious facts of our modern lives, and that’s why there’s a market for films like Precious: Based…
Posted on: December 30th, 2009 | Comments (15)
What are the best movies of the decade? How the hell should I know? To hear the critics tell it, it’s Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, plus a lot of other solemn bummers I didn’t see. However,…
Posted on: December 28th, 2009 | Comments (68)
Avatar turns out to be the one about the white guy who gets mixed up with Noble Savages and likes them so much he goes native, right before the big battle. So no surprises about the plot. But what about…
Posted on: December 21st, 2009 | Comments (33)
Sometimes you just want to see a lot of people die, but if you did anything about it in real life, you’d get entangled in a lot of red tape. So you head off to the cinema instead and watch…
Posted on: November 15th, 2009 | Comments (21)
I’m morbidly devoted to the works of Charles Dickens. It’s a childhood aberration. At a young age I started reading whatever books were on the family shelves and bonded with Dickens and Twain before I had a fully formed cranium,…
Posted on: November 9th, 2009 | Comments (8)
I finally got around to seeing Paranormal Activity, the low-budget ghost movie that’s making so much money. It’s spinning through the predictable cycle already charted by The Blair Witch Project ten years ago: 1) early fan buzz and glowing reviews,…
Posted on: October 25th, 2009 | Comments (20)
Listen to the Radio War Nerd podcast [subscribe here] with guest Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson of Iceland Public Radio on the massacre in Orlando and how online Islamic State jihadis are dealing with battlefield defeats and the shrinking caliphate. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd through the show’s Patreon page.
The political establishment’s racist, authoritarian reaction to the 1992 LA riots—blaming broken black families, massing cops and troops, and Ron Paul’s advice to his family on how to kill black “animals” and get away with it…
This is my third entry on the big blast at the Islamabad Marriott. God, the name says it all: “Islamabad Marriott.” Talk about two words that don’t fit together very well. The town just wasn’t big enough for “Islamabad” and…
Here’s the deal: I’m going to blog this Islamabad blast every day for a while, try to talk honestly about how to sift through the crap to try to figure out what’s really going on. It should be a good…
BREAKING WARNEWS! You’ve probably heard by now that Al Qaeda just zapped the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. A truck blew up while security was going over it with sniffer dogs. At least the dogs died happy, I suppose. Those sniffer…
America’s chickenhawks are ready to turn Georgia into a nation of missing-relative-seeking refugees. I’d hate to be Georgia right now. So many American pundits have plans for the Georgians, brilliant schemes designed to get Georgia into a big war with…
It’s been tons of funs watching the dust settle over South Ossetia, watching everybody go crazy and do their best to avoid the fact that Putin kicked our proxy ass. If you’ve ever wondered how countries deal with military defeat,…
Here’s some more cool combat vids for you desk casualties. This time it’s Georgian troops shooting the Hell out of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, on the day they rolled in to retake the province after Bush and Cheney promised…
There are three basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin’ little war in Ossetia: 1. The Georgians started it. 2. They lost. 3. What a beautiful little war! For me, the most important is #3, the sheer beauty…
