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 […]
★★ When a movie is less than good, it matters less where it lies within the chronological order of its franchise and more how it got to be its way. A little over a decade ago, Fede Alvarez rebooted The Evil Dead (1980). The final product was a misfire worth remembering only for the concentrated […]
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 […]
★★ Richard Linklater and Glen Powell are not deep thinkers. Hit Man would be a much better film if they understood that. Linklater in particular has never evolved in his musings about life, human needs, and the sense of self after one, no more than two, semesters of college. If he took more than that, […]
★★★½ I don’t believe in the end of history. Count me proudly among those many – left, right, and center – who mocked ol’ Francis Fukuyama for his book, and still adheres to the imperfect, yet far more perceptive word of Fukuyama’s old teacher Samuel Huntington and his response essay The Clash of Civilizations? Back […]
“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 […]
★★★ Nationalism has a place in movies. Indian cinema proves it. No American movie today would have a scene like the flag wave-off in Fighter. To understand why it’s there is to appreciate something about borders. America’s most unfriendly neighbor is a country whose government would never openly declare war, but would happily create a […]
V for Verbatim 