An angel came down from heaven and give me twenty dollars, so I rolled my bones out to the picture show.  My plan was to see the evening screening of The Dark Knight Rises, perpetual Batman mark that I am, but I had plenty of time to kill before it started, and no particular place to go, so I saddled up with the appropriate sugar delivery vectors ( Read more... )

The use of violence is not only one of the most powerful conundrums not only in fiction, but in life.  In art, the most problematic aspect of violence is that it is often used as a framework for threat and action, designed to bring viewers into a story who might not otherwise have the patience for an ordinary story of struggle and pain; the risk is ( Read more... )

Goodness knows who I am disappointing in this matter, but The Hunger Games is probably the best blockbuster film I’ve seen in years.

Which isn’t, unfortunately, to say it’s a great movie.  It suffers from a lot of the same problems all blockbusters do, and as is the case with all of us, it can’t escape its raisin’, but we’ll get to that.  (The ( Read more... )

Comic books, it is safe to say, made me who I am today.

Though I was an unusually literate child, reading above my grade level practically from the time I learned to read, I never enjoyed anything as much as I did superhero comics.  I devoured them from my early ’70s childhood up until the early 1990s, when a combination of external factors (women ( Read more... )

Whenever I write about politics, someone I know - often it’s a well-meaning friend of largely the same liberal temperament as myself - will scold me about being an idealist.  We are, after all, discussing “the art of the possible”, and it does no good to refuse to face up to practical considerations, even if it means admitting that some of my pet ( Read more... )

Jose Ortega y Gasset called the metaphor “the most fertile power possessed by mankind”.  He compared its potential to reshape the world to that of magic, a divine implement somehow handed down to mere humanity.  Indeed, one could argue that the metaphor is humanity; it combines two of our most unique qualities - language (the ability to transform ( Read more... )

1.  Highly controversial choice meant to enrage readers, thus drawing lots of links and hits

2.  Conventional but ‘artsy’ choice to prove aesthetic credentials

3.  Completely ordinary choice that is actually the thing you like best, but you put it third so as not to seem obvious

4.  Another completely ordinary choice meant to lull readers into ( Read more... )

“All right, let’s move on to Action Item #7.”

“Why must we call them that? This is all talk. No action.”

“It’s just a phrase, mighty Genghis. It is meant to remind us that these items under discussion are meant to be acted upon immediately rather than tabled.”

“What table? There is no table.”

“It’s a figure of speech, mighty Genghis. Shall we move ( Read more... )

As soon as we see Edward G. Robinson in The Woman in the Window, we know there’s going to be trouble.  He’ a professor of psychology (a fact that is helpfully driven home by the name “SIGMUND FREUD” on the chalkboard behind him, even though nothing he’s saying has anything to do with Freudianism), and he’s delivering a lecture to his students on ( Read more... )

I first met the Zodiac Killer in the fall of 1970 at a dinner party given for him by Grace Malley and her husband, Yezny Finkelblatt, head of Motion Picture Studio’s security cameras deivision.  My wife of the moment, Corrida Mexia, was seated next to a lovely young co-ed who would later end up starring on the front page of the Examiner‘s crime ( Read more... )