Reading the criticisms of Thor: Love and Thunder — in particular the remarks about its tonal incoherence, and its shift into self-parody — I find myself recognizing complaints fairly standard about series’ that have run too long. (I find myself thinking of, for example, the more oft-criticized Bond films of…

In Indiewire Tom Brueggemann made the case that Top Gun 2 has “saved the movies.” His argument goes that in a Hollywood which has thrown over stars for franchises, and these overwhelmingly of the CGI-loaded “media” sci-fi type (comic book superheroes, Star Wars, etc.), …

With the second week of August already upon us it seems fair to say that Top Gun: Maverick has taken the box office crown for the season (and perhaps, the year). Not only did it have an extraordinary opening weekend exceeding even the high expectations for it, taking in over…

When I first picked up Jack London’s Martin Eden my first thought was of its being an inversion of his earlier The Sea-Wolf. Where that novel saw a cultured bourgeois plunged into the world of rough sailors and forced to survive in it, Martin Eden had a rough sailor plunged…

I have long since stopped paying much attention to what is said about movies that has not been long since completed and so close to a proper, firm, reasonably unmovable release date as to be virtually immovable — in part because since the outbreak of the pandemic things have gone…

These last couple of years China’s “lying flat” movement has been making the news internationally. The phenomenon may recall to mind such phenomena as Japan’s hikikomori, or American stereotypes of the country’s young men turning into basement-dwelling gamers rather than getting jobs, dating, marrying and starting families. However, in line…

I recall happening across Mike Judge’s Idiocracy on cable at about the time of its premiere there. I remember being astonished that a twenty-first century film would so blatantly make a case for dysgenics — specifically the prospect of (presumably) low IQ “poors” out-breeding the (presumably) high IQ upper strata…

It seems rare that anyone mentions Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy and his HBO show Silicon Valley together, but it seems to me that the two works are both sides of the same coin. “Elitist porn,” Rick Paulas calls the dysgenics-themed Idiocracy with its brutal mockery of the “low IQ,” which…

Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Newsweek piece “Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana” has been the butt of many a joke over the years, but not because of its title. Had Stoll limited himself to merely arguing what his title claims we might well remember him as having been clearer-eyed than his…