Saw Inherent Vice last weekend; this is P.T. Anderson's two-and-a-half-hour long adaptation of the eponymous novel by Thomas Pynchon, which is set in So-Cal in 1970, and follows the half-hearted, half-awake ex-cop turned hippie PI Larry "Doc" Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) as he somnambulantly pursues several different cases that he apparently takes ( Read more... )

Finally watched Zeitgeist: The Movie (2007) via Netflix; it had been recommended to me a few years ago by a co-worker from Eastern Europe who, while not normally beholden to conspiracy theories, has enough ethnic, national and religious hatreds (to wit: Roma -- whom he refuses to dignify by that name; he insists on calling them "gypsies" -- ( Read more... )

Saw The Wolf of Wall Street last Friday night (27 December); that's the new movie from director Martin Scorsese and writer Terence Winter (one of the main writers on The Sopranos and the creator, head writer and show runner for another HBO series, Boardwalk Empire), based on the eponymous memoir of convicted financial criminal Jordan Belfort, who ( Read more... )

From Wed., 12 June 2013 to Monday, 15 July 2013, I read Peter Stephan Jungk's novel The Perfect American, an English translation of Der König von Amerika (published in 2001 by J.G. Cott'sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, Stuttgart; the original German title's literal translation is "The King from America," or "The American King," BTW) by Michael ( Read more... )

Last night / this morning, I watched Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter (2011), starring Michael Shannon (soon to be the subject of much fanboy scrutiny due to his role as General Zod in the forthcoming Stalin bio-pic Superman movie, Man of Steel; although he's also made an impression in HBO's Boardwalk Empire as a profoundly disturbed Treasury agent, and ( Read more... )

Just downloaded the app to let me read the magazine Vanity Fair, which I subscribe to, on my recently-acquired Kindle Fire; supposedly I won't be charged the $1.99 a month after the first free month because I am a subscriber, but we'll see. (As of now, I've not gotten the apps to read the tablet editions of the other magazines that I subscribe to ( Read more... )

Ever since I read Tony Scott's review of The Gatekeepers, the talking-head documentary-cum-interview with six retired chiefs of Israel's Shin Bet internal security service that played for the last week of last November in Manhattan to qualify it for an Academy Award (the ploy was successful; it's nominated for Best Documentary), I've been champing ( Read more... )

For various and sundry reasons (one of which happens to be a still-ongoing series of trials and tribulations with my spouse's and my vehicles, plus [PERSONAL CRAP], still more [PERSONAL CRAP], a bout of some non-specific gastrointestinal complaint, and a comedy of errors of an audit at work that dragged on two weeks longer than it should have), I' ( Read more... )

I recently watched The Shuttered Room (1967), an adaptation of the eponymous short story by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth (I believe it was a posthumous collaboration); also on the DVD was the 1966 misfire It!, a shoulda-been-better movie about the Golem. (It! should've been better because it was produced, written and directed by the guy who ( Read more... )

Finally saw Detour (1945), a short (68 mins.), much-celebrated film noir directed by Edgar Ulmer about a dim (dim, I tell you!) would-be concert pianist who, after exercising some very poor judgment when a shady good Samaritan perishes after helping him, falls into the clutches of an abrasive (and, apparently, alcoholic) femme fatale ( Read more... )