In the current conversation about weapon legislation, I hope we can all agree that it’s rather astonishing that so many are openly attacking children, for several reasons. First, the National Rifle Association knows when to shut up, as it did right after the Orlando shooting and the Las Vegas shooting. It could have let the March for our Lives just happen, and then go back to controlling the narrative a week later. But no, the NRA and its acolytes had to […]

And still loving this article all about them. Worth a repost. Erin go’bragh!  

Hi, George Soros here. Have you noticed how well my fake, heavily financed #metoo campaign is going? How it’s almost brought down Donald Trump! I love it. I know Trump isn’t impeached quite yet, but I got to take a little victory lap here. Nobody realizes my genius. First I made up a whole story about Harvey Weinstein and fed it to a few of my stooges in The New Yorker and The New York Times. My assistant was like, […]

In 1902, Georges Melies made a short film called A Trip to the Moon which, in some ways, invented narrative cinema. A Trip to the Moon was the first widely seen film to entirely dispense with anything that could be called realism, and longtime magician Georges Melies very well knew his film was fiction, but he would not and did not add the word “science” in front of “fiction”; at the time, even the pioneering authors H.G. Wells and Jules […]

Every year, I pay my own money to see the Oscar-nominated live-action shorts; it always makes for a fine afternoon in a theater. Never do I expect the short films to shine a light on my situation with Dar. This year, I got one-two sucker-punched. In a good way. Spoilers. Are you really going to see these short films? Got your Shorts.TV account all set up? Okay, in that case, don’t keep reading. Everyone else, keep going. The first film […]

The race for this year’s Best Picture Oscar is uniquely unpredictable – at least five films have a plausible path to victory, far more than we usually see by this point in the season. The race for this year’s Best Picture Oscar is also unique in that, if you throw in I Tonya, the race provides an exquisite decade-by-decade historiography of Anglo-American culture since the 1940s. It’s not enough for these films to merely be set in their time; they’re also […]

I can almost guarantee that whether you are liberal or conservative, male or female, old or young, you will disagree with the next sentence I write. Here it is: 95% of us got through 95% of the 20th century without saying the word “delete.” Doesn’t seem possible, does it, when we now rarely get through the day without using it? Up until the 1990s, most of us didn’t have home computers. And for the few that did, there was rarely […]

You speak me more than you speak any other sound. And yet you don’t know how to write me. You can’t type me. I’m not on the internet. I am literally unknown to instagram and most other sites. I’m not on urbandictionary.com. Dude, I’m not on dictionary.com. And yet, without me, you couldn’t talk. You would be very literally out of luck. Why is this? It’s partly because I’m so unstressed. Linguists love to talk about how I’m always unstressed. […]

Why is this Martin Luther King Day unlike other Martin Luther King Days? Because today marks the 50th time that we’re recognizing his birthday without him. A half-century of coming to terms with what we lost, of trying to live by his example. This is also the first MLK Day under the 45th President. It only seems like he’s been President for 50 years. If Dr. King was still with us at the tender age of 88, what would he […]

This post appeared at Filmotomy. “The Florida Project” was Walt Disney’s 1960s-era code term for a planned East Coast amusement park, an euphemism justified by Disney’s fear that Orlando property owners would demand that Disney reimburse them at market rates. The secrecy worked, but what Disney couldn’t prevent was the hotel and motel industry’s successive Florida Project, a mini-gold rush that snapped up all the land within miles of the Magic Kingdom’s property. Nor could the Mouse House do much about […]