Clever meta-take from Douthat. I’ll miss him when he’s at 60 Minutes.
I hope he doesn’t forget how to type the way Bill Simmons did. I like writers to stay writers!
Clever meta-take from Douthat. I’ll miss him when he’s at 60 Minutes.
I hope he doesn’t forget how to type the way Bill Simmons did. I like writers to stay writers!
How is it possible that no one knows how to make an IMAX camera anymore, including IMAX?
We love showing our kids “old” movies from our childhoods in the ’80s and ’90s, and usually they work just as well on them as they did on us.
Last night we put on Hocus Pocus from 1993. It was unwatchable. We turned it off after ten minutes. Was this film really so beloved that they made a sequel three decades later?
I finally wrote up my thoughts on Nolan’s Odyssey.
In Pro Ecclesia I have a review of Michael Peppard’s How Catholics Encounter the Bible.
Even though The Odyssey is out and by now everybody’s seen it, I enjoyed reading David Denby write (sight unseen) about the challenges of cinematic adaptation. Every one of the problems he identifies shows up in Nolan’s film in one way or another (not always as problems, but always as decisions).
I enjoyed these “25 Unsolicited Thoughts on American Literature for America’s 250th."
(H/T: Robin Sloan.)
Karl Johnson, writing about sabbath in Books & Culture in 2010: “when it comes to the ever-encroaching world of work, resistance is greatly aided by legal proscription.”
Audrey Watters asks: “Who is ed-tech for?" The question answers itself.
My experience reading Neuromancer was not as pleasant as Freddie’s, but like him, I’m worried about the adaptation and hope it’s better than the trailer suggests.
A year ago I wrote a review that includes the following:
The chief problem with American Heretics, then, is that it is one long exercise in begging the question. Readers will look in vain for arguments defending or establishing Copulsky’s views. He leaves them mostly unspoken, and only occasionally, through insinuations and ingratiating asides, makes them known. The result is of a piece with recent approaches to political and intellectual history that consist entirely of quotation and paraphrase, the bulk of it introduced with a smirk and capped by a sneer. Call it the passive-aggressive style in Trump-era historiography. The author conspires with readers to ogle and gawk at the strange wrong-thinkers on display without ever finding it within themselves to strike up a conversation or ask an honest question. The one thing they know in advance is that they have nothing to learn from the encounter.
I continue to find this characterization of Trump-era historiography both accurate and useful.
Read Alan on the girl’s story.
Ritchson not only got the funding for this gonzo gem by agreeing to star in it, but is a producer as well. Look up the films he’s been associated with since getting cast as Reacher. They’re all kinda weird and commercially questionable, including the Kristen Stewart biopic “Seberg,” which his company produced but Ritchson didn’t act in. If projects like these are how Ritchson plans to spend the cultural capital he’s accrued by starring in a hit series, let’s hope he’s surrounded himself with the most irresponsible advisors who ever lived.
Seems reasonable to me.
