Film critic J. Hoberman got axed from the Village Voice today, and old-school cineastes are rending their garments in grief and crying “Oh the humanity!”
Personally, I hate J. Hoberman and the film criticism he rode in on, and I only wish he’d tripped and broken his neck on the way out the door.
Oh, all right, if that’s too harsh, let’s say I wish he’d broken his arm. His writing arm.
January 5th, 2012 | Comments (30)
True Grit is a big hit for the Coen brothers, giving them their best opening weekend ever. Their growing popularity cues two inevitable reactions: 1) the claim that they’re improving as filmmakers, finally learning how to do it right, “it”…
December 28th, 2010 | Comments (43)
Notice to readers: We are scrapping the Great Living Americans nominating process due to your miserable failure, and hereby revoke your suggestion privileges. The eXiled has also initiated a review of our policies regarding the solicitation of reader input to…
July 4th, 2010 | Comments (84)
You might have heard that Mark Twain’s autobiography is going to be published this fall—the real one, not the abridged, expurgated, censored, compromised, cleaned-up, Sunday school superintendent version that’s circulated over the years. 5,000 pages of sheer bile, cussedness, and…
June 17th, 2010 | Comments (54)
What’s so funny? If you really want to appreciate the highly realistic portrait of America the Coen brothers have been working on for twenty-odd (very odd) years now, I recommend reading the “viewer responses” to Burn After Reading on a…
September 15th, 2008 | Leave Comment
This article is a War Nerd Classic Christians are stone killers. You put a Christian and a lion in an arena and I’ll bet Toyotas to Subarus the Christian’ll have the lion for lunch. Just look around you: lions are…
But let’s take the question seriously for a second here: who won in Iraq? To answer it, you have to start with a close-up of the region, then change magnification to look at the world picture. At a regional level the big winner is obvious: Iran. In fact, Iran wins so big in this war that I’ve already said that Dick Cheney’s DNA should be checked out by a reputable lab, because he has to be a Persian mole.
There are actual American heroes. Not a lot, and you don’t hear much about them, but there are a few. I don’t mean working moms who spend their Saturdays spooning soup into winos. I mean classic citizen-soldiers who get it right every…
Some of the weirdest, longest wars around have been on the other side of the Big River, but for some reason most American war nerds would rather read about Eurasian battles. Not sure why, except I remember when I was…
When we lived in Long Beach, my dad used to say the same thing every time we saw the sign to the yacht club: “You know what a boat is?” He’d ask the car that, then wait for somebody to…
Well, it’s ten years and a couple of days since 9/11. The reason I’m two days late doing a look back is that 9/11 is boring. I’m sick of it. And the ten years since are just depressing, at least if you’re an American.
While everybody was distracted with Libya, something interesting happened on the Golan Heights. The Palestinians, with a lot of pushing from the Assad people, staged their own version of the Green March. And it failed.
