★★★ It’s a good thing this series is over so I don’t have to keep losing brain cells trying to figure out the title. Last I checked, this film’s predecessor was called Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Now we have the eighth film, simply titled Final Reckoning, but which has, not to spoil […]
Birth of a Nation (1915) is no more racist than you are. 110 years after its debut onto the American screen, it seems that everyone apparently knows everything about this film from the title alone, whether they have seen it or not. Dare to mention the name of it, or the name D.W. Griffith, and […]
When Donald Trump succeeds you as the President of the United States, you failed. To understand Trump beyond blindly loving or hating him requires understanding the context in which he emerged. Trump is and always has been a reflection of, and a referendum on, his contemporaries. Not just because he is, by nature, a mud […]
The following essay constitutes the second part of Godfrey Cheshire’s two-part masterpiece column “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema.” Just as with Part I, which you can find here, I own none of the words, but am merely re-printing them faithfully in honor of the quarter century since its original publication. These essays were […]
The following essay is not my own. It is merely a faithful transcription of a landmark pair of essays by Godfrey Cheshire, formerly of the New York Press. It was a two-part column, now collectively known as “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema.” I own none of the words written here, but I am […]
★★★ “Flawed as it is…” No sermons, no lectures, and no statements; but in Juror #2, Clint Eastwood empathizes with the American system of justice. Every time I saw something that otherwise would have annoyed me as a lawyer, I liked the film more for the personal ethics it applies to the political system. When […]
★★ Leaving the theater after viewing Reagan, I felt the opposite of how I imagine almost everyone else who liked the film probably felt. Instead of feeling the sunny optimism emblematic of the Gipper himself, I felt an overwhelming sense of depression and disappointment. Yet I also felt the opposite of how I assume people […]
60 years ago today, the United States declared war on poverty. If the outcome of such a war was not clear 5 years later, 10 years later, 25 years later, or even 50 years later, it is clear by now that poverty won. To put in perspective just how long this war has been waged, […]
In George R.R. Martin’s perverted modern “fantasy,” you must kill the baby. Unfortunately, that was often how things went in medieval times. It was also how the communists dealt with the Romanov family less than a year after they took over Russia in 1917. But what does it mean when it is depicted by a […]
“World War” is an imaginary term. There has never been a literal “world war.” Many countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Portugal, Vatican City, and Tibet did not participate in World War II. They are part of the world, yet they never went to war. The Allies also did not win either world war by […]
V for Verbatim 