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.

Or, as I remarked on Twitter: Sheri Moon Zombie:Rob Zombie::Leslie Mann:Judd Apatow.

Whatever. Still looks interesting. If you’re into that sort of thing. (The teaser was better.)

(Sorry things have been slow here, been busy at work. Stay tuned, though: There’s a-doings a-transpiring!)

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 is often depicted as hypersexualized, and while he’s not alone in being oversexed (see: Pam), the trait feels quite loaded when applied to a gay man.

Dude: Every single character on Archer is hypersexualized! The show’s premiere episode’s opening sequence ends with a post-menopausal, matronly woman masturbating to the visage of a Russian KGB general! Archer sleeps with, by my rough count, 23,927 women in the show, often two or three at a time! Krieger created a virtual anime sex kitten girlfriend/wife! Pam is, well, Pam! Cheryl gets off on being choked and slapped around! The two least sexual characters on the whole show, Lana and Cyril, spend most of the first half of the first season trying to figure out ways to get it on! (If I remember correctly; it’s been a while since I watched the entirety of the first season.) But how dare you show that the gay dude is a sexual creature because, Oh-Emm-GEE! SterEOtypes!

Gah. Anyway. Carry on.

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.)

If you’ve seen the film, you remember the sequence well: Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) have been bested by head house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) and his vicious owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) in their gambit to purchase the freedom of Django’s wife, Hildy (Kerry Washington). Schultz, suffering from a form of PTSD, endures agonizing flashbacks to the scene in which a slave is torn limb from limb by a pack of dogs while he waits to conclude his business with Candie. Blood gushes and entrails stream from the tortured slave’s belly; his screams and the snarling dogs jarringly interrupt a harpist playing lovely lovely Ludwig Van in the parlor in which Schultz stews.

That Schultz’s flashbacks—and his refusal to shake Candie’s hand to conclude their business—take place next to, and then within, the house’s library is no accident. Waltz, who opposes slavery even if he is not an outright abolitionist at the film’s beginning, is tormented by the images he has seen. Like so many northerners exposed to the horrors of slavery through tales of escaped slaves and books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Schultz has been radicalized. He knows that Candie has him over a barrel, but the faux-gentility of the South—the parlors filled with white cake and harpists built on horrible suffering—disgusts him. He will not play their game.

This is why, when Candie demands to shake his hand, Schultz at first demurs, and then murders, the Mandingo-fighting owner of Candyland Plantation. Schultz may be able to turn a blind eye. But he will not, even implicitly, give this preening monster the satisfaction he so desires.

After firing the proverbial first shot, true war breaks out. Django grabs a pair of guns and goes to town, gunning down a dozen or so Southerners as he tries to shoot his way out of Candyland. What’s remarkable about the shootout that follows isn’t necessarily the buckets of blood but the sound design. As the scene is shot in slo-mo, the whine of the bullets also slows. But, if you listen carefully, you realize you’re hearing not rifle shots but cannon fire. We may be seeing bullets but we’re hearing artillery—and seeing it too, if you think about it. Because those buckets of blood that splash up every time a bullet smashes into the corpse behind which Django has taken cover resemble not blood so much as land, churning, splashing up when a shell lands, leaving craters in their wake.

Men scream as lead rips through their flesh like a dog’s teeth through a slave’s belly, but there is no sadness here, no glorious lost cause. This is retribution for the South’s original sin, rendered harshly. The war has come to Candyland one year before it came to the rest of the Confederacy.

There will be no survivors.

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 88 minutes, one would be excused for leaving the auditorium feeling nauseous and close to exhaustion.

The plot asks a question never asked before: What happened to Hansel and Gretel—the brother-sister duo abandoned by their father in the woods who burned to death the witch that tried to eat them—after “happily ever after”? The movie’s answer is that the pair decided to put their experience to work exterminating the world’s apparently endless supply of witches.

Working as bounty hunters and traveling from village to village to eradicate the broomstick brigade, Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) have stumbled on to a mystery. Why are the witches they are hunting this time around taking children so brazenly? And how will Hansel and Gretel stop the head witch (Famke Janssen), a powerful crone who is able to appear fully human?

The picture is not without charm, and gives off an occasional flash of ingenuity, such as when Hansel complains that being force-fed candy led to his needing shots every few hours lest he become lightheaded. It makes sense that Hansel would grow up to be diabetic. The repartee between brother and sister is also occasionally amusing. Arterton and Renner are well suited for their respective roles.

What few flashes of joy there are, however, are badly bludgeoned by the film’s bellowing score, shoddily created 3D effect, and chopped-together editing.

Perhaps my nausea was a function of the multiplex IMAX in which I sawHansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, but the sound was nevertheless overwhelming, and almost earsplitting.

A vibrating cranium may also explain why the visuals often seemed so poorly done. The 3D effect, which was achieved in post-production so the studio could cash in on 3D surcharges, frequently went in and out of focus. And it was occasionally blurry, which combined with the fast-paced nature of the frequent action sequences led to double vision and headache. If one is tempted to see this film, avoid 3D at all costs.

Adding to the picture’s woes is a plot that seems like it was cobbled together at the last minute. Subplots are briefly touched-upon and then abandoned with haste.

Basic incongruities stack up. One example: For some unexplained reason the magic of dark witches fails to work against light witches and their offspring until the final sequence when, for some, unexplained reason, it suddenly does work.

While Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters never falls into the trap of taking itself too seriously (a major problem with the similarly titled, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), the movie fails to live up to its admittedly meager promise. Substituting commotion for cleverness, this is one better suited for cable than the theater.

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 it. I just want to comment on one quick thought by Nell in the introduction:

The single most important attribute for a career in reviewing each week’s big studio releases is an infinite capacity for awful movies. We become critics because we love to watch great movies and then we end up sitting through an endless series of buddy cops, gross-out comedies, second-rate superheroes, chases, explosions, and remakes of television shows that some studio executive loved as a kid. And yet, almost always I can find some moment—some performance, line of dialog, production design, or insight—that makes me glad I saw it.

The most important attribute in the modern day movie reviewer** is the capacity of generosity. In order to be helpful to your readers, you must accept a film on its own terms. Which is to say: One shouldn’t complain that an Arnold Schwarzenegger film isn’t a Kubrickian contemplation on the nature of man. It’s easy to slam your standard Hollywood offering—easy, and oftentimes warranted—but it can get awfully boring recounting the ways in which our entertainment lets us down. Trying to find an element of excellence in everything you see is harder but, ultimately, more rewarding in the long run. This, of course, doesn’t mean pretending to like everything or cutting bad films an infinite amount of slack.

On an entirely unrelated note: I’m going to a preview of Hansel and Gretel this evening. I really hope they screen it for us in 3D!

*Can one really “flip through” an ebook? Hard to say.

**There’s an important yet blurry distinction to be made between “movie reviewer” and “film critic.” I break it down something like this: The former connotes an element of service for your readers—”Will you like this movie?”—whereas the latter deals with slightly headier concerns—”Should anyone like this movie and what does it tell us about the medium in which it exists?” But your mileage may vary.