Shuffling through the final papers of the semester, I encounter one that discusses Richard Wright’s Lawd Today! and the genius of how Jake’s quotidian routine is parasyntactically laminated over Lincoln’s birthday radio speeches and other media pronouncements that render his activities patently and ironically more meaningless by playing the myth over them, to which I stand back […]
I’ve seen the entertainers of my generation, inebriated, intoxicated, plastered on multiple magazine covers, who sweat illicit substance; who marry for publicity; who annul to marry again; who sell “stolen” sextapes; who philanthropically adopt numerous children; who switch sexuality bi-weekly; who slander the system; who embrace the freedoms of capitalism; who flash the peace sign in subtlety; […]
Jan09
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters — Perhaps You Could Have This Record for a Few Quarters More
In 1982, a mustachioed, mulletted kid set the high-score record on one of the Golden Age of Arcade Games’ Donkey Kong; in addition, this prestidigitation prodigy also achieved a record high score in Donkey Kong Jr. and was the first player to ever record a perfect game in Pac Man, wherein the player kills all enemies and […]
My mailbox purged forth two Netflix DVDs a bill and a statement as I opened it. Inside, the gag reflex for this mailus vomitus was a thicker-than-normal issue of Time Magazine, whose Person of the Year stared blankly at me as I wrestled the tightly would weekly from my bulimic mailbox. Green eyes stared blankly from a […]
“You must pay for everything in this world, one way or another. There is nothing free except for the grace of God.” So Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) tells us in Joel and Ethan Coen’s reimagining of Henry Hathaway’s True Grit, which is based on Charles Portis’ novel. Unsurprisingly, the Coens do a fine job with this remake […]
As the New York City Sanitation Department is condemned for their lackadaisical performance during last week’s blizzard, I gaze out my window at the piles of uncollected garbage that fill our New York City street, so it seems appropriate to make a brief list of the rubbish movies that I saw this year. Now, just for clarification, […]
Two of my guilty pleasures are Under Siege and The Rock, which might be the only Nicolas Cage movie that doesn’t make bile creep up my throat. However both of these movies have one thing in common: they advertise themselves as action movies, guaranteeing an adequate amount of dialogue to fashion semi-plausible plot lines and provide some […]
Celebrities and performers are easy subjects for films because they personify qualities that many of us desire: affluence, success, and perhaps even fame. At the same time, their shellacked visage is often the creation of another, a doppelganger to themselves, a disguise to generate capital and cultivate a brand. As this visage sometimes cracks, the embryonic person […]
About six months ago, I sat in The Penny Farthing, a bar in the East Village of Manhattan, and four of us at the table waxed philosophical about what we would do should we encounter a wild animal, being that the abundance of squirrels, rats, and pigeons in Manhattan – and raccoons in deep Queens – suggests […]