The Best of the Century List can be found here. So begins a new tradition on V for Verbatim. Lists are fun. They’re what movie writing is all about; they’re instant conversation starters, useful catalogues that remind people “hey, this movie exists too.” But cinema has had something of a problem lately that goes beyond […]
★★ It won’t be as easy to dismiss Avatar: The Way of Water as it was the first. The closest I can get is to call it “Whale Wars: The Avatar Movie.” But that’s less instinctively intuitive than what everyone called the first: “Dances with Wolves and/or Pocahontas in space with blue cat people.” I’m […]
★½ Ryan Coogler should never have agreed to return for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. It is beneath his great talents, a waste of time, and a dishonor to Chadwick Boseman. In the years since Avengers: Endgame played with the space-time continuum to undo the erasure of half the universe by taking away anything and everything […]
A quick guide to determining your predictions for the upcoming House midterms. In nearly every midterm election, the party in power loses seats. Over the last four consecutive midterm elections (2006 – 2018), the president and his party have either lost the House or further lost the House. Before that, strange events disrupted the usual […]
Over 21 years into the 21st century, Ed Rollins is a name only remembered by political historians, beltway swamprats, and whatever I am. Actually, that’s a lie. Before I picked up this book, I had never heard of Rollins. Thanks to Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, I will spend the rest of my politically aware […]
The Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022 is now nearly 200 days old. Happy anniversary. Well into the fighting, this war is now almost twice the length of the next closest war that mirrors it – the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland, where the newly-purged Red Army invaded Finland with over twice the strength, […]
Top Gun‘s legacy sequel of 36 years owes its story and existence to a great many things; not just the original. It’s “Mission: Impossible” and Heartbreak Ridge (1986) with fighter jets and erotica – your easy tagline for Maverick. See it in IMAX, then see it again. It deserves it, and so do your local […]
“I know those law books mean a lot to you, but not out here. Out here, a man settles his own problems.” – Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) Sixty years ago, perhaps the greatest western of all time released to theaters all over the United States. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance returns to us more […]
It hasn’t always been this way. There is only one way to fix it. And it ain’t pretty. The newest Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson – a former clerk of the Justice she has been chosen to replace, a federal practitioner of criminal defense, former member of the United States Sentencing Commission, and near-decade […]
“We don’t make good citizens, but we make good prisoners.” – The Warden Welcome to the end of the Ten for Ten. The end of the experimental decade in cinema, the end of Clint Eastwood’s serial acting collaboration with any director (from this moment onwards, he has acted in fewer than ten films that were […]
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