Seriously, it beats me how people managed to develop such an appetite for sloppy sentimentality. With each successive hit feature, Pixar tests the limit of that appetite, and finds that there is no limit. Audiences drink up vats of Pixar’s…
Posted on: June 21st, 2010 | Comments (26)
It’s pretty simple, really. If you don’t like action films, don’t go see The A-Team. That is, if you complain when a film has explosions, and a lot of shooting and punching and special effects crashes and whatnot, and no…
Posted on: June 14th, 2010 | Comments (26)
We’re desperate for a laugh these days. Life was bad enough already without oil-covered seabirds. So naturally some gits arranged to provide us with oil-covered seabirds, really glopping the oil on them so they’re clearly immobile in the photos except…
Posted on: June 6th, 2010 | Comments (12)
Feck, as the Irish say. Feckin’ independent film, it’s not worth shite. I just watched Ondine, this Neil Jordon thing set in contemporary Ireland about a soulful fisherman played by Colin Farrell, who catches a young woman in his fishing…
Posted on: May 31st, 2010 | Comments (17)
Iron Man 2 is such a huge hit, it’s clear everybody’s going to see it regardless of critical praise or condemnation. Each of us can—or will soon be able to—fulminate about why it’s good, bad, or meh. We don’t need…
Posted on: May 10th, 2010 | Comments (43)
I woke up for the second morning in a row with a vague feeling that something terrible had happened. Then I remembered I watched the Oscars.
Posted on: March 9th, 2010 | Comments (36)
Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is messed up in some ways—we’ll get to that in a second—but it’s seriously beautiful at intervals that command attention. There’s a war theme in it that’s pursued with surprising gravity. Example: the Mad Hatter (Johnny…
Posted on: March 7th, 2010 | Comments (41)
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…
Every day this week I’ve gone to the computer and googled the same question: “How many attackers Mumbai?” And I still haven’t gotten anything like a straight answer. Of course the official Indian story is “ten.” Right. Ten guys, kids…
For the next week I’m going to try blogging every day. Things have just been happening too fast for the occasional article. Every day there’s something I want to talk about, and that’s how I’m going to do it. Today’s…
Will India and Pakistan ever finish the cat-fight and get on with a real war? “We live in hope,” like my grandma used to say — but don’t hold your breath. Listening to the Indian and Paki generals shaking their…
Well, now we know my pals the Somali pirates are loyal War Nerd readers. At the end of my column saluting them for taking on a supertanker, I suggested they go for a cruise ship next:
I sure didn’t expect to be spending Thanksgiving morning sucking down instant coffee and flicking channels between CNN and the BBC. But the attacks in Mumbai are so big and, like they keep saying, “brazen,” that I stayed up late…
Cop groupies, naval warfare nerds and gas-starved SUV moms around the world all had the same hero last week: the Indian Navy. The Subcontinental squids announced that they had struck the first blow for law’n’order on the high seas by…
Yo ho ho ho time in Somalia! What’s the bestest present kids dream of in faraway Puntland, where piracy is more than a Disney marketing gimmick? A supertanker, that’s what. A Saudi supertanker is the ultimate in stuffed stockings: 100…
