I may have made fun of it a while back, but honestly, I don’t hate the concept. I might scope it if it rolls through one of the apps I have. I cannot, however, promise that I will do that. Movies in this era are largely an individualized aesthetic exercise, not a community one. The… Read More Maybe I’ll see Nomadland, Maybe I Won’t
Every now and again, because I do not learn, I google the phrase “winds of winter”, the title for the next book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series (remember Game of Thrones?). I do this because, nine years ago, I did this for “A Dance With Dragons” and happened to catch a… Read More Time for the Yearly George R.R. Martin Abuse Post
You fail to blog by blogging to fail. Or failing to plan. Or deciding that you’ve got a bunch of projects occupying your mind and you can’t even begin to reckon on a subject for a post. Or, you don’t actually decide that, it just becomes the default and then you’re seven days into the… Read More Blogging Lulls Begin Insidiously
80’s Nostalgia has been going on so long that the teenagers who were doing it 15 years ago are now grown up and have kids of their own. Do they nostalgize their nostalgia? Is there anything else? Are we permanently stuck? Does this whining help? No to all, and the questions have become boring. The… Read More Sweep the Nostalgia, Or Why Cobra Kai Does and Does Not Suck
The joke of the year (decade?) is they don’t, and I’ll have to explain to my grandchildren that long ago there were these big living rooms with hundreds of seats that people used to pay half the price of a DVD (what’s a DVD, grampa?) for one ticket, and by kitchen snacks for, and sit… Read More Do They Even Have Movies Anymore?
Anything pertaining to Football. I haven’t watched a game all year. That’s been the case for a number of years, really. Football used to be an entertaining sport before every part of it got dissected like a pregnant frog for television, to be jabbered about by half-wits in ugly suits. The Super Bowl is a… Read More Things People Care About, That I Don’t.
A long essay, but worth your time, which dovetails nicely with other things I’ve written on the subject. Our Cranky Professor lays out three “approaches” to aesthetics/beauty: The Psychological Approach – In which one experiences beauty as an individuated response to the appearance of a thing. A Flower is Beautiful. The Rational Approach – An… Read More The Three Tiers of Aesthetics
Twitter impresario Mencius Moldbugman stomps on the Last Film in Theaters with both feet. Apparently Nolan has been utterly corrupted by his early Hollywood success and is now incapable of directing something better than mediocre (which is kind of the vibe I got from Dunkirk). Apparently Tenet is two hours of rampaging nonsense. I don’t… Read More “Tenet” is Bad, “Sound & Fury” is Good
This is going to seem counterintuitive, but it’s true. A “Feature Length” film is one 60 minutes or longer, according to the Screen Actor’s Guild. Most movies are somewhere between 80-120 minutes, although some popular films, such as nearly all the Star Wars movies, are longer (The Last Jedi, the longest one, is 152 minutes,… Read More Movies are Short Stories, TV Shows are Novels
The significance of boredom, as a cultural force, cannot be overstated in the modern age. Our economy and culture revolves to a strong degree on Entertainment, on the manufacture of excitement and drama. When food is plentiful, and most of the necessities of life available, excitement and drama, outside of the struggle to obtain newer… Read More What is More Boring, NPR or Sports-Talk Radio?
