Dear Readers, Remember me? No worries if you don’t. It has been a slow summer of criticism for me, and for a variety of reasons. First and foremost is that, as I get older, I have less and less patience for the slew of commercial crapola that Hollywood spews out during the warmer months, and so I’ve…
The following is a guest post by Anthony Flores. Imagine if every war movie was a biopic about a general. Imagine if every war movie was Patton. The granular view of the individual foot soldier, one of the most compelling perspectives to those of us who never experience war, would be lost. Gone would be…
Some news from The Hill yeseterday on the popularity of House of Cards among a certain demographic: “The popular Netflix series about a villainous congressman-turned-vice president shows a decidedly dark side to Washington, but that hasn’t kept political figure from watching it, or from using it to promote themselves. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday…
House Democrats are exiting stage left. Yes, Beltway pundits have noticed that an inordinately high number of veteran House Democrats have opted to retire this year instead of face another Congress under Republican control. The latest – and perhaps the most telling – is Rep. Henry Waxman, a 40-year veteran of the U.S. House of…
Here’s a small but thought-provoking news bite from last weekend. The Obama administration will soon be issuing a proposal to require most movie theaters to offer technology for the blind and deaf in all their theaters. This technology already exists, and most multiplexes offer it in at least one theater, but it’s not offered in…
On the surface, The Butler might seem like an awfully conservative film. It certainly takes the form of one of those safe historical epics that Hollywood loves to put out around Oscar time – its rush through eighty years of history is a little reminiscent of the reactionary Forrest Gump. But as a movie that…
Does anyone remember gun violence? Back in January, just one month after the Sandy Hook shooting, Obama announced that he was taking 23 executive actions intended to reduce gun violence in America. I have a sneaking suspicion that if I asked you to name one, you couldn’t. It’s not your fault; the media covered it…
If future historians are ever looking for evidence of the political schizophrenia and tribalism that engulfed American in the post-9/11 era, they could do much worse than White House Down, a film that presents itself as an argument for peace and reason but is built on a foundation of cartoonish, consequence-free movie violence and a…
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