I've watched Joker twice now and I think I've started to work out just why it leaves me so cold. It's actually pretty durned racist, but it does it in a pretty sly way. It's subtle. At a gut-check level I think I knew something was wrong, but it was really hard to connect to at a surface level.

( Spoilers )

(Spoilers for Mockingjay, both the movie and the (first half of the) book.)

I finally worked myself up to see the Hunger Games movie tonight. If you remember it's a YA franchise it actually works remarkably well, and this is one decision to do a Part I/II split on the final installment that I actually agree with. At the risk of giving too much ( Read more... )

I've been rereading "The Adventures of the Three Students" (read it online) to go along with the sherlock60 community's discussion ( Read more... )

Yesterday I shared a funny fake-trailer of the first two series of Sherlock. And while the show does have its lighter moments ("We are in Buckingham Palace, the heart of the British nation. Sherlock Holmes, put your trousers on."), what really pulls me to it is its high drama. The excellent work on character-building, the look at how friendships ( Read more... )

I'm teaching an Aristotle reading tomorrow where he talks about what it means to be a good human. Before he can do that, though, he thinks he has to work through what a human is. I'll spare you the details, but basically Aristotle says that what sets us apart is that we can look at a situation and choose to go one way or the other; unlike Buridan's ( Read more... )

Oh, hi weekend ( Read more... )

The Hobbit trailer is up. Yes, *gollum*, we likes it.

I actually more than liked it. I was touched to the point of tears and angry by what I think of as theodicy by any other name. In Tolkien's legendarium there is this idea that there is a God of the cosmos, and a resulting sense of purpose in at least some of the character's purposes. It's one ( Read more... )

I swung by Best Buy tonight and they were having a very good sale on my kind of DVDs. I picked up all three Lord of the Rings, and Troy and Invictus besides. And at $4 a DVD, it came to about what I'd spend on a Friday night in Manhattan (movie tickets, popcorn, drink at a jazz bar afterward ( Read more... )

Because I didn't do this last week:

1. I have no cavities.
   
2. I have a passing GPA.
   
3. "Theology and Falsification" by Anthony Flew. I'm putting my syllabus together and skimmed it to see if it would be worth including. I had forgotten how much I love working through why I disagree with this essay.
   
4. This piano player:
   
   ( Read more... )

I finally got around to seeing The Ides of March tonight. Interestingly, the movie theater was still packed. I had read a few reviews suggesting it just didn't "hang together" as a movie, but I still had high hopes. I came of age politically in the age of West Wing, and the first R-rated movie I saw was Primary Colors. I'm enough of an idealist to ( Read more... )