Here are things I’ve written at the Free Beacon’s blog, all of which you should read if you haven’t already.
Video games don’t cause violence. Or maybe they do! But we really don’t have any proof one way or the other and it’s silly to think we do.
Similarly, it’s silly to think that just because the president loves books he should oppose drone warfare.
Maker’s Mark is economically illiterate and determined to damage its brand by watering down its bourbon.
Football and Fútbol are in dire straits, though for different reasons.
Stephen King’s book on the Kennedy assassination does that thing where liberals assume that Kennedy would’ve extricated us from Vietnam and waged the Cold War in a far different manner if he had lived. This is weird.
I think that’s it for now. Go! Read! Click. Close and then click again!
The Free Beacon, where I work when I’m not blogging about Rob Zombie trailers, is starting a blog! Actually, “has started” a blog. Because it’s live and filled with stuffs! Check it out. I’ll wait.
Pretty cool, right? It’s like 2005 all over again! Blogs: the wave of the recent past.
So here’s the deal: I’ll still be posting stuff here. Sometimes. Mostly I’ll be posting what I was posting here over there. And then maybe doing a link roundup once every couple of days saying “here’s what you’ve missed by not adding the Free Beacon’s Editor’s Blog to your RSS feed.”
So, yeah. The aforementioned doings have transpired. I hope you enjoy the new thing. Feel free to complain about it here, as we’ll have no comment section over there.
Here’s my one-sentence review of Beasts of the Southern Wild:
Mildly overrated, in large part because it falls into the category of “interesting” cinema, Beasts of the Southern Wild is less interesting as a narrative exercise than as a time capsule of early-21st-century American neuroses.
It’s over at the Free Beacon. Short version: I liked it!
It is a fun film, one that doesn’t strain the cranium—indeed, it might aggravate the brainpan if one gives it too much thought—while also providing plenty of eye candy. It is also the first feature that Walter Hill, best known for hardboiled features like Last Man Standing and Red Heat, as well as the premiere episode of HBO’s Deadwood, has directed in a decade. …
Bullet to the Head is an adrenaline-fueled, rip-roaring good time that asks little of audiences while still managing to fill their most basic filmgoing needs.
Look, it’s easy to hate Sucker Punch. Easy, but wrong, for reasons I lay out here. Here’s another (NSFW for language) revisionist take on the film, this time in video form. For the record: I don’t agree with every argument made in this piece (I think the whole argument about the various waves of feminism is a reach), but it gets at an important aspect of Zack Snyder’s most underrated work, namely the way he’s playing with formal conventions of perspective on film. Critics didn’t get Sucker Punch the first time around, dismissing it as brainless titillation. They will come around. In time.
(If you’d prefer to read the transcript, Slash Film has it here.)
I don’t have enough time to fully dive into the silliness of this Slate piece arguing that Archer is especially homophobic, but I do want to highlight one bit of especial silliness: On the other hand, Archer often plays off the kind of homophobic stereotypes that historically fostered so much fear and hatred toward gay people. Ray [...]
The sequence in Django Unchained that jumped out at me the second time around is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most frenetic sequence in the film. (Spoilers after the jump.)
Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is not the worst movie I’ve ever seen. But it is an assault on the senses, an overly loud blast of static that at times—I am not making this up—left me seeing double. Viewing the film in IMAX 3D was less an experience than an endurance test. Even at a scant [...]
I’ve been flipping through* Nell Minow’s 101 Must-See Movie Moments, an entertaining ebook that highlights, well, must-see moments in films that you might not have caught (or lesser-talked-about moments in films that everyone has caught). At $1.99 (and free for Amazon Prime members), it’s a steal, especially considering all of the work that must have gone into [...]
