Sir Ridley Scott’s 2000 movie Gladiator with Russell Crowe as the hero Maximus has been one of the more unexpectedly culturally influential films of the 21st century. Americans had thought endlessly about Ancient Rome until the later 20th century, as my recent visit to Washington, D.C., pointed out. Countless structures in our nation’s capital are modeled on the interior of Hadrian’s Pantheon, from the Capitol rotunda to the Metro stations. Similarly, sword-and-sandal movies, for instance, had been a huge deal in the 1950s and 1960s, both low-budget Steve Reeves types and colossal ...
Having a column that runs Monday/Tuesday means I’m forever doomed to post the evening before/day of elections. And today? You’re on edge. Everyone is. So I’ll take my cue from Sting, January ...
Has 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola pulled off the artistic comeback of the century by liquidating half of his heirs’ expected inheritance in his wine business to film Megalopolis, a screenplay ...
I considered writing about presidential politics, but the way things are going lately, by the time you read this on Wednesday, we may well be on to a whole new storyline I can’t ...
As I mentioned last week, I took a Substack poll regarding my readers’ preferred topics, and the top vote-getters were “scolding idiot rightists” and “musing about ...
I’ve done three straight weeks of politics, so let’s lighten the mood with the Holocaust. Wait, that came out wrong. I mean, let’s lighten the mood with Hollywood. And the ...
The Last Duel, a 2021 film by Sir Ridley Scott with Matt Damon as a mulleted French aristocrat chud battling honorably (if stupidly) a suave Adam Driver in 1386, turned out to be ...
In director Christopher Nolan’s campaign to save moviegoing from technological and social obsolescence, his latest ploy is his most clever yet: to lure grown-ups with ...
One of the most fervently held dogmas of the 1969 wave of feminism was that the only reason boys and girls liked different toys was due to sexist socialization. I was young in the ...
My friends (and one or two foes) have informed me that my past few columns have been downers. “Can’t you do something a little lighter?” they ask. “Also, what’s your ...
]It’s Oscar season! Which of course means only one thing: White people are evil. Of course, to be fair, that also applies to rainy season, holiday season, baseball season, ...
I can vividly recall driving along the coast of Baja California in late 1996 a few days after being diagnosed with cancer, feeling sorry for myself about my impending ...
My Christmas gift to myself this year is a column about zombie movies. I’ve been wanting to do this one since October, when it was announced that Night of the Living Dead is ...
To have been born in the USA in 1946 was to have been dealt aces in the poker game of life. Those born in the first year of the baby boom went through their days finding that ...
Tár is a strong art-house drama for older audiences about a #MeToo scandal in the arts that cleverly buys itself the right to be moderately sympathetic toward its ultimately ...
In the words of John Goodman from Barton Fink, “Jesus, it’s hot.” L.A.’s historic, unprecedented September heat wave is literally murdering me. But you wanna know ...
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