The Steven Spielberg film Lincoln is exactly what you expect: a tight, interesting, well-written docudrama about an extraordinarily important but frequently over-simplified part of American history. So points for helping to bring that back to the forefront for those willing to watch it. But, surprisingly, it isn’t really that much about Lincoln. And while the Civil […]
The Occasional Movie Review
Is it wrong to say that the entertainment value in a movie is just as strong as the educational value in it as well? The Sapphires is a story based very loosely in real life of an Aboriginal singing group in the late ’60s who end up travelling to Vietnam to entertain the American troops […]
The Occasional Movie Review
I haven’t been to a movie on its opening day in ages. But for months, all of us here have been looking forward to the opening of The Lego Movie because…well…Legos, and it just looked hilarious. And it was. The story is about Emmet, an ordinary Lego living in a huge Lego city, following the instructions […]
The Occasional Movie Review
I’ve seen Psycho once. And yes, it freaked me out. I’ve seen other Hitchcock films as well, and I actually felt that Rear Window and Rope were better (Rope is my all-time favorite Hitchcock film because of what it manages to do–make you get as panicky as the lead characters who’ve murdered a friend and put his body in […]
The Twelve(ish) Guilty Pleasures of Christmas
Day three. And this one hurts a little. One of the great double-edged swords of our modern mobile-technology age is that everyone–and I mean damned near everyone–almost always has a camera with them. And more likely than not, that camera has internet access. This means that those people can post cute pictures of their kids, […]
The Twelve(ish) Guilty Pleasures of Christmas
Day two. Continuing from yesterday’s website theme, the next guilty pleasure is a set of sites I go to at least once a week, and sometimes twice a week. They’re the types of sites that I believe makes the internet such a wonderful place–with so many people of varying interests, it’s great to have well-made […]
The Twelve(ish) Guilty Pleasures of Christmas
Welcome to a new feature here at the ol’ blog, wherein I lay out the guilty pleasures I enjoy both around this time of year and during the rest of the year. Might as well give thanks for all of them and air my shame all at the same time, right? First up, I’ll celebrate […]
The Occasional Movie Review
Somehow, it isn’t at all surprising that a president–especially one as generally well respected by history as Franklin Delano Roosevelt–would have a mistress. Or perhaps mistresses. Which may be part of the point of the movie Hyde Park on Hudson: to portray FDR as a regular, flawed man, and not the overblown four-time leader of the […]
Doctor Who
Ages and ages ago, like most of my 8th grade peer group, I’d stay up late on Friday and Saturday nights (or I’d videotape the episodes) and watch this British sci-fi show called Doctor Who. Being a British show, and being sequestered to late nights on our local PBS station made it hard to find […]
The Occasional TV Series Review
I’ve tried. Really, I’ve tried. But I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do this. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has fallen in love with this series. Except me. Because, I’m starting to think, it’s taken an excellent original version and twisted it so much that it’s become aimless and uninteresting. But […]