Doing this fell by the wayside as I was wrapped up in bringing Caligula to market (The Kindle Countdown deal is going well, by the way). But having a few free evenings, I was able to clear out the notebook and talk about some stuff I’d meant to all summer. Here are the results.
Somewhere on I-81 in Virginia, there’s a billboard for Cracker Barrel, because of course there is. If you find yourself on the interstate and there isn’t a Cracker Barrel within 30 miles of you, then start taking pictures of the alien plants and the non-Euclidean geometry, because you’ve slipped into an alternate dimension. Anyway, this… Read More The Reproducibility Trap, Or Why Everything Original and Curated Becomes Re-Heated Crap
As promised, a new episode of friendly rambling. I plan what I talk about with these, some notes I want to make, and then I just let the ramble happen. It gives me ideas and let’s me talk out loud about where my thoughts are. This one covers new readings and old movies. Available on… Read More Content Blues, The Podcast – Episode 3: Poems, Prose and Princes
Time for Low-Rent Clint Eastwood to Ride Again. The only question is Why, and there’s only one answer. No one is going to enjoy this. Harrison Ford is too old for this. He was too old for it in the last movie. It’s going to be regurgitated trash, that will almost but not quite pay… Read More Oh Good, a New Indiana Jones Movie
Carl Schmidt was a German jurist and political philosopher of the Weimar and Nazi eras. True to the time, his writings contain very strong critique of what he called “the liberal critique of politics.” He phrased it that way because to his mind there was no such thing as true liberal politics, as the essence… Read More Doing Things For a Reason: Miller’s Crossing and the Friend/Enemy Dynamic
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?
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
What does it mean when a movie doesn’t do well? It means it didn’t “find an audience” it didn’t appeal to enough people. Not that it doesn’t appeal to anyone. How much is “enough”? To make money. Now, I suppose that Christian Toto is right enough in his overall explanation for why Birds of Prey… Read More Birds of Prey Eats the Seed Corn
Here’s what’s playing at My local Regal tonight: Charlie’s Angels 2019. Because if you keep scraping, the barrell has no bottom, right? Ford vs. Ferrari. Days of Thunder made palatable to critics by historical place-setting. The Good Liar. Old people intrigue, prompting a new generation to ask “Hey did you know Helen Mirren had her boobs out in… Read More Let’s Not Go To the Movies: A Continuing Series of Curmudeoning at the Debased Art of Cinema
The problem with Corporate Art, as Andy Warhol foresaw, is that quantity eventually smashes quality. They keep repeating the same gestures, catch-phrases, plotlines, until whatever narrative existed logically has been spread out into meaninglessness. If you keep making enough seasons of a show, you will make it boring and tired. If you keep making enough… Read More Stick a Time-Traveling Fork In the Terminator Franchise
Content Blues 