There is no reason to get irritated when mediocrity triumphs; that’s what the Oscars are for.  Of all the movies that have won Best Picture there’s really only about 3-4 that actually rank among the best of American film.  The last 15 years, starting with Forrest Gump, have been particularly egregious.  Now let’s dish.
Kate Winslet [...]

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National Review’s list of the Greatest Conservative Films is kind of pathetic.  It’s basically the “We’re cool, too!  We rock out to Springsteen!” kind of thing that you hear from time to time.  Except worse, because while NR will succumb to intellectual honesty when discussing Bruce Springsteen’s politics, this is mostly lies, paeans to [...]

My five favorite songs of 2008, which may include music made and released in ‘07 but which I in my infinite out-of-touch-ness only became aware of this calendar year:
“Strange Overtones,” Brian Eno and David Byrne
“Me + Yr Daughter,” Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head (g0d, what an awful band name)
“Escape City Scrapers,” Mono in VCF (okay, I [...]

It’s profoundly shitty and tedious.  I shelled out $15 to see it in IMAX when the special effects are mediocre CGI and you barely see anything or anyone, in the sense that the destructive quotient contains no human scale nor much in the way of grandiose devastation.  War of the Worlds was much, much better, [...]

Went to the Castro Theater last night to see the public premiere of Milk, the biopic about the U.S.’s first openly gay elected official, Harvey Milk.  He was a San Francisco supervisor elected in 1977 after the city reorganized from having an at-large board to allowing districts to elect their own representatives, and shot a [...]