Category: Weapons of Mass Distraction

Few things Americans like better than watching TV and movies of Americans killing far off peoples so we can forget America killing far off peoples.

June 29, 2006

Drive By Briefing of President Bush

A wonderful piece of video — get it while you can — illustrating the effects and contents of what George Bush — the man himself, a ramblin’ and explannin’, up and grinnin’ wide as day on the hot spot before the camera — very genuinely, believably described as a “Drive-By Briefing,” prepping him for questions…
March 4, 2005

To Catch a Thief

Grace Kelly: John…. Grace Kelly: John…. Grace Kelly: Are you going to make it hard for me to apologize? Cary Grant: Not at all. I’m sure you’re sorry. Grace Kelly: You know I am. Til mother told me, I had no idea the things you were up against. Cary Grant: Well. Grace Kelly: What are…
November 29, 2004

Culture Wars: The Soundtrack

I don’t watch prime-time American network television any more, nor the HBO and other comparable cable fare that increasingly dominates evening viewing and day-after conversation in its stead. To the amazement and despair of friends, family, and other die-hard friends of “Friends”, I have thus far refused to watch even a single episode of “The…
November 29, 2000

Mission To Mars

The joy of Mission To Mars is to think that some reviewers actually found anything to praise in the movie. I had a sense that the chief scriptwriter was a 7 year-old kid locked up in his room with a space rocket and a tape recorder for ten days. The highlight of the movie was the escape from the doomed lander as it headed wildly toward a flaming entry into the Martian atmosphere, seeing the astronauts file out in a weightless conga line, only to turn their heads to watch the craft disappear far below into a flaming meteorite.
November 29, 2000

Outside The Matrix

Like all genuine science fiction, the film The Matrix is, at bottom, not about some horrifying possible future in which machines rule the world but an allegory of the present in which mere mortals much like ourselves do.
March 26, 2000

stupid people

I have yet to understand how anyone can interpret American Beauty as a movie about dysfunctional families, suburbia and “life’s changes.” This is the essence of why American Beauty to me is a very bad movie.