The Invisible Counterpoint

The Witch is about an evolved family, brutally ruptured by an evil so powerful there was nothing they were going to be able to do to master it. Evolved? This absurdly Puritan family? This nutso sin-obssessed family—evolved? Yes. Historically, the Puritans themselves had better parent-child relations than their English kin... they were less intrusive parents, less punishing, and seemed to others like families "stepped out of time." They fled England for Plymouth so to not be swamped by their regressive countrymen. And this particular family flew their Plymouth colony, it would look like, for the same reason—they were prepared to balk authority; everyone else in town stays components of a collective. Yes, they instruct their children how sinful everyone is—what we moderns recognize as a significant kind of abuse— but when we see the family before it gets half-crazed by visible signs of the actual Devil preying upon them, we see no hitting, no sexual abuse; we see i...

I'd like to superimpose the fourth-wall breaking Deadpool that I'd like to have seen in the movie . In my version, he'd break out of the action at some point to discuss with us the following: 1) He'd point out that all the trouble the movie goes to to ensure that the lead actress is never seen completely naked — no nipples shown — in this R-rated movie was done so that later when we suddenly see enough strippers' completely bared breasts that we feel that someone was making up for lost time , we feel that a special, strenuous effort has been made to keep her from a certain fate — one the R-rating would even seemed to have called for, necessitated, even, to properly feed the audience expecting something extra for the movie being more dependent on their ticket purchases. That is, protecting the lead actress was done to legitimize thinking of those left casually unprotected as different kinds of women — not as worthy, not as human.    2) When Wade/Deadpool...

According to the psychiatrist I pay most attention to, James F. Masterson, children who grow up under mothers who require their children to meet their own unmet needs for attention have a very difficult time nurturing what he calls their "real self." What happens is that the mother's strongly averse reaction to the child's first sign of autonomy, which occurs when as an infant s/he first started walking, and which kicks in hard once again at adolescence, scares the child away from full (or even partial) self-realization. In the way of the path ahead to ever becoming his or her real self are fears and pains arising owing to feeling abandoned, which are so paralyzing they're akin to what reliably blocked Truman from just driving across the bridge and leaving Seahaven in The Truman Show. He calls them the Six Horsemen of the Psychic Apocalypse: Depression, Panic, Rage, Guilt, Helplessness, and Emptiness. What happens to such children? They never really grow up, ...

Hail, Caesar! The Force Awakens In the Heart of the Sea Bridge of Spies Steve Jobs The Martian The Overnight Inside Out Jurassic World The Avengers The Hobbit  (book review --2014) Ex-Machina American Sniper  (from American Sniper to Triumph of the Will?) American Sniper  (Eastwood's comfort zone) Exodus: Gods and Kings The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies Fury Guardians of the Galaxy Boyhood Lucy Railway Man Transcendence Bad Words Draft Day Nymphomaniac Noah Divergent Non-Stop Pompeii 3 Days to Kill 12 Years a Slave  (it might not have been worth it, Lupita) Oscars  (too late -- we  saw  your boobs) Gravity and 12 Years a Slave  (out of the frying pan and into the fire) Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit Her Wolf of Wall Street  (fork in the road) Wolf of Wall Street  (part two) Wolf of Wall Street  (part o...

The critic Richard Brody has written that in Hail, Caesar the Coen brothers are exploring their own 1950s origins. So that would be two men of 2016 looking back on a very patriarchal society where father knows best and where the majority of families were still raised in a conservative fashion (this wasn't a time where you were supposed to float free and discover your own calling, but still mostly follow through with what your ostensibly "did it all for you," "self-sacrificing" parents expected of you). And so we might presume there would be some criticism of this previous social order—the women we see confined to supplementary roles would show the capacity to actually lead companies if only they were in the 21st; those we see shepherded into accomplishing what others expect of them would betray something rote about their efforts that would be absent if they'd had the freedom and encouragement to discover what they themselves wanted in life. Yet we do n...

Original Article: The Clintons’ sordid race game: No one will say it, but the Clintons’ rise was premised on repudiating black voters SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 2016 10:22 PM NotARepublican Emporium Hillary represents as an ideal the educated professional, feminist and cosmopolitan in outlook--liberal individualism: something that tasks the mind to achieve. Sanders may be more each of us as brothers and sisters, common identity, where it's easy to imagine it being about mental slippage.  Permalink Original Article: Our terrified hyperpatriots: Here’s what Palin, Trump and anti-Muslim extremists fear most SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 2016 9:41 PM This article doesn't seem so much concerned about the hyper-patriots as liberals who might potentially be slipping. It shores up and warns. The (German) Left's response to the recent episode in Cologne was that the sexism you saw on display there was no different than it is amongst non-migrants. "Cologne" shouldn...