Time travel and the new Star Trek movie

Mrs. Ombud enjoyed the new Star Trek movie, and I’m glad I saw it.

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Comics, Superheroes, & Neoteny

Superheroes were different when I was a kid. They mostly lived in comic books. Superman later became a TV show, but the special effects were so hokey you could practically see the strings propeling him in flight around the stage. We didn’t mind. We were kids. It was understood that childhood imagination, pretending, was part of the [...]

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Of Widows, in Water

I’m pretty omni-movirous, meaning I like a variety of movies, so long as they’re moderately plausible and the stories are well told. There are not many genres I avoid, really — given that I want a good plot and don’t want to suspend disbelief like a hangman working overtime. So when we put Water in our Netflix [...]

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Canditatorial Candor

Hillary Clinton is beginning to seem like Hubert “The Happy Warrior” Humphrey to me. The prospect of Hillary running against John McCain feels to me a bit like choosing between Humphrey and Nixon.

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The root of the problem — part two

Bamboo stalks and leaves are easy enough to whack away and dispose of. It’s the rhizomes that wear you out.

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Strangers in a Familiar Foreign Land

We watched a very engaging movie last night about four North Africans who volunteer to fight for the French. Part and parcel of the story is that these men are fighting for a nation that has colonized their own countries. As soldiers in Europe they find themselves in wonderfully ambiguous places, confronting scenes and situations [...]

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Of Offices and the Veldt

All dreams begin in a sort of psychic confinement, as if context is lost and you’re reborn of circumstances you cannot explain.

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One Bright Shining Moment

We’ve seen a lot of documentaries so far this year; such as
The Yes Men, Outfoxed, Bush’s Brain, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,
American Blackout, and This Film Is Not Yet Rated.
A good documentary gives me something not commonly known, so I didn’t care for
Shirley Chisholm ‘72: Unbought & Unbossed, and I thoroughly enjoyed
One [...]

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Steve McQueen, Achieving What Others Attempt

Bullitt was on TV last night.
Once again I was so drawn in to Steve McQueen’s role that I forgot I was watching an acting performance. The word natural gets overused, but McQueen so becomes the character that you can forget you are watching fiction and get completely involved in the story.

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Cut!

Malcolm Cowley wrote a wonderful introduction to a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories where he describes the cultural changes that struck America in the 1920s. It was a sharp rift. The young kids of the Jazz Age felt the older generation was morally bankrupt on issues such as women’s suffrage, prohibition, and the war. [...]

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