★★★★ “Cease quoting laws to those of us with swords.” – Pompey Magnus — “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 […]
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 […]
★★★★ “But perhaps, as your father used to say: ‘A taut hand at sea is better than a slack one.’“ What does it mean to create a civilization? Is it possible that something as lawless as a mutiny can bring about one of the greatest advances in law, order, and institutional structure in history? Mutiny […]
★★★★ “If the Secretary wanted me out of there, it must be pretty bad out here.” – Ethan Hunt As a rule, the longer a franchise runs, the more stale it gets, and the easier it is to spot the moment where it peaked. Even with exceptions, the rule remains. Harry Potter peaked with the […]
★★★★ Let’s talk about racism. I’ve held for years that the most racist regular moviegoing audience isn’t actually anyone in the good ol’ You-Ess of A. It’s China. The joke of it is that just about everyone knows that as well as I do, but that Americans, and elites in particular, don’t know what to […]
★★★ “I don’t think we should be governing ourselves. What we need is a king, and every now and then if the king’s not doing a good job, we kill him.” – George Carlin Here comes an unsurprising statement that my future obituarist will put as the subheading right after “widely beloved murderer of pineapple […]
★★★ I’m probably supposed to hate this film. Readers familiar with me know that while I understand the genuine fears individuals have when they encounter the police uniform, I despise and would celebrate the demise of that certain organization whose trite three-word slogan is also its proper noun title. And the very first thing Malcolm […]
★★★½ How ’bout them oners? One of the things my subconscious does during a film, even a film I hate, is to mimic some of the immediate experiences of the people at the center of it. When James Bond goes underwater, I hold my breath with him. When Dave Bowman from 2001: A Space Odyssey […]
★★★½ “Never apologize, Mister! It’s a sign of weakness.” – Captain Nathan Brittles If I had to sum up the basic differences between films before vs. films after 1972, it’s that films before practiced the art of subtle non-subtlety, while films after it tend to practice non-subtle subtlety. The difference looks a bit like this: […]
V for Verbatim 