Everybody complains about how dumbed-down movies have gotten. Here, for example, are representative quotes from A.O. Scott of the New York Times in "Spoon-Fed Cinema" bemoaning the state of movies c. 2009: "infantile," "male immaturity," and "a program of mass ...
October is the busiest month on the spectator sports calendar, when we finally get to the baseball games that do matter, and most football teams still have hopes that their games will matter. Football knocked off baseball as America's national sport in part because its one-game-per-week schedule ...
What follows is the text of former President Barack Obama’s farewell address, which he delivered before departing in the interstellar battlecruiser that had landed near the Washington Monument on Friday morning: I am both surprised and deeply humbled by the decision of the Directorate of the ...
Let's celebrate diversity! In Division 1-A college football, 19 of the top 20 players in rushing yards are"as sports fans expect"black. Yet, the #1 rusher is a white guy. Toby Gerhart, Stanford's 235-pound tailback, has piled up 650 yards on the ground to power lowly Stanford to a 4-1 ...
Based closely on the outstanding 1999 novel that won J.M. Coetzee the Nobel Prize in Literature, the new art house film Disgrace follows August's District 9 in portraying the ever-growing Afrikaner diaspora's dire view of black-ruled South Africa. While most reviewers of District 9 were too obtuse ...
Watching Steven Soderbergh's comedy The Informant! (with Matt Damon as that guy back in the 1990s who squealed to the feds about how he fixed the price of lysine for Archer Daniels Midland) reminded me of Econ 101, where you learn about the glories of competitive markets. Traditionally, economists ...
Having listened to country music on and (mostly) off since Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" four decades ago, I checked in on Billboard's Top 30 Country chart to see if anything was new. A possible advantage about not knowing much about what I"m talking about when it comes to music is a ...
Extract is the third live-action film written and directed by Mike Judge, creator of the hit animated TV series Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill (which will broadcast its final episode this coming Sunday after 13 seasons). Judge's first was 1999's Office Space and the second was the ...
Are men to blame for the economic crash? That's become a popular theme in the press. For example, the BBC's business editor Robert Peston recently stated in "Why men are to blame for the crunch:" "I routinely characterise the credit crunch as "men behaving badly""because ...
While watching Inglourious Basterds, I had time on my hands to ponder once again whether Quentin Tarantino's variegated gifts and inclinations would have made him even more suited for other careers. Reviewing Kill Bill: Vol. 2 back in 2004, I wrote, "His talents, while broad, don’t mesh ...
