CapitalistImperialistPig

Edgar Rice Burroughs was one of our most prolific and inventive writers of adventure fantasy, and his Tarzan books were his most important. From the Wikpedia article: In a Paris Review interview, Ray Bradbury said of Burroughs that "Edgar Rice Burroughs never would have looked upon himself as a social mover and shaker with social obligations. But as it turns out – and I love to say it because it upsets everyone terribly – Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world."[21] Bradbury continued that "By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special." In any case, he wrote the first books I read, and I soon read nearly everything he wrote. The new Tarzan movie is silly, of course, but it aims at a serious subject, the brutal exploitation of the Congo by one of history's great villains, King Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold stays off screen, but one o...

From time to time I get dragged to an art house film. Most recently I caught Marielle Heller's movie The Diary of a Teenage Girl , based on Phoebe Gloeckner's semi-autobiographical, semi-graphic novel of the same name. It has been nominated for four Gotham awards, which may or may not presage something in Oscars. This is not your usual teen movie. Instead it's a stunning, even shocking story of a rather disastrous adolescence. Bel Powley, nominated for best actress, plays the fifteen year-old Minnie Goetze, and the movie, like the book, is the story of her affair with her mother's thirty something boyfriend, somewhat complicated by the usual adolescent problems, including especially her mother, a frequently drunk, drug addled and always inattentive bimbo in mid 1970's San Francisco. Unlike typical teen movie stars, who look like movie stars, Ms. Powley actually looks like a fifteen year-old, though she is actually in her early twenties. The diary of the tit...

I thought it was going to be about photon-lepton scattering, but it was still pretty good. Of course I had trouble keeping track of all the characters, so it probably helps to have a Rolodex of your West Coast rappers handy for reference. It also seems I might need a bit of Ebonics training to decipher both lyrics and dialog. The story of NWA, told from the perspective of a couple of key players.

"The universe has eleven dimensions, but we don't see seven of them. It's like having basic cable." That is an approximation of the most memorable quote from String Theory, the movie. Yes, there really is a movie by that name, starring people you never heard of, and there is even quite a bit of chatter about string theory. Getting the drift of this movie is a bit like learning string theory - time consuming and arduous. After the initial scene where the preacher croaks in the middle of giving a sermon to a nearly empty church, it takes quite some time to introduce the other main characters - a mute boy, a homeless man, a prostitute whom we are sure will turn out to have a heart of gold, a string fanboy/druggie/??, an aging physics prof, a mercenary coke snorting televangelist, a couple of hoodlums... you get the idea. OK, I picked up this movie for the title. Aside from the morality play/action drama playing out in the background, an awful lot of this movie is...

Hairspray , the movie. The music wasn't bad, and the Tracy actress could sing. The good news sort of ends there. I tried to overlook the movie's shallow racial pieties - it was a musical after all. John Travolta has been entertaining in a wide variety of movies. Unfortunately, his turn here as Jabba the Hut (or something) isn't one of them. Michelle Pfeiffer, luckily enough, was pretty much unrecognizable as the villainous villainess. Christopher Walken did what he could with what he had to work with. More serious was the lack of any discernable wit. This kind of movie really does need to be funny. Catastrophically for a movie about a dance contest, there was very little good dancing on display. Why not, I wonder? I suppose I was spoiled. I happened to catch a little bit of an old Gene Kelly movie the other day.