Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from February, 2017

Fellowship of the Ring

Fellowship of the Ring Frodo had been living amongst the inhabitants of the Shire for at least fifty years since he went off with the wizard Gandalf to retrieve a Dwarven homeland and rescue onto them, a treasure-hold of gold. He came back to the Shire possessed not just of gold but of reputation — here was one who had had actual contact with things others in the Shire could only count as imaginings, and been sufficiently up to the experience he hadn’t come back blemished. This prowess was useful for Bilbo, for it served as a protective ward over his quiet, comfortable living space: what other would ever dare venture upon his space other than timorously, when, after all, he could quickly transplant into any unforeseen entangling situation the Bilbo that kept wit and self-possession, with and before a dragon! All magic, all charms, run out eventually — if this isn’t truth, it’s nevertheless how all the simple view those of prepossession built in part out of magic. And since som...

Film reviews: 2013-2017

Get Out Nocturnal Animals Fantastic beasts and Where to Find Them Arrival Loving The Witch Hacksaw Ridge Dr. Strange Moonlight Inferno Keeping Up with the Joneses The Accountant Birth of a Nation Girl on the Train The Magnificent Seven Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children Captain America: Civil War Deadpool (Superimposing another "fourth wall" Deadpool) Deadpool (Dead potential) Hail, Caesar! The Big Short 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 Nymph...

"Get Out" encourages a step back

"Get Out" inflicts upon the viewer a vicariously experienced form of shame. The main character, Chris Washington, is dragged along, deep into a weekend, where he has to constantly try and mentally encircle an enclosure around a constant barrage of overt breaches of respectful conduct, so to claim his weekend experience as something he lasted through and bested. He wants his rich girlfriend's relatives to be nutty, is intent on transmogrifying experiences to process them as idiosyncratic, oddball, rather than as they are -- which is off-puttingly presumptive and assaulting -- because he wants to force the experience into one of "just meeting the strange but very rich, old wealth relatives of my-perhaps wife-to-be," rather than their ostensible old-fashioned preference of it as "just meeting another of our daughter's off-putting boyfriends we'll pretend to be all for but really just ably manipulate, use, and discard." If he's successful ...

Transgender bathrooms

Patrick McEvoy-Halston 3 hrs  ·  Fox News  ·  The left would be most smart to fully understand that part of their previous success with the transgender bathroom policy, with transgender recognition overall, owes to what was only going to prove a momentary situation: that much of the population was suffering from a masochistic desire to be lead along into viewpoints that run counter to anything they can ground as "common sense." The left has always understood that it is though the courts or through a sympathetic president that they were going to advance human rights issues; they never really believed they were going to get most Americans' sympathies, and ground their gains through them -- through their enlightenment. "You can count on the coastal cities, but everywhere else you have to stake gains at least in part through coaxing, manipulation, and near-blunt intimidation, because here's the people "we all," after all, esca...