In Memory of Paul Newman

September 30, 2008 – 8:58 am

Paul Newman is dead.

He died of lung cancer at age 83, at his home in Connecticut. He is survived by his wife, five children, and two grandchildren.

He was one of the last of the great old stars, the ones who were larger than life. That’s a cliché now, but Paul Newman was the real thing.

He was a World War II veteran, a husband of 50 years to actress Joanne Woodward, a philanthropist, a political activist, an auto racer, and a businessman. But most of all, he was an actor.

Newman would’ve been too pretty if he hadn’t been so good at playing beautifully damaged men. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Entertainment, movies, obituary | Comments (0)

A-list Actors Hug Polar Bears; World Is Saved (Not Really)

September 24, 2008 – 4:16 pm

I find celebrities just a little presumptuous. Not all celebrities, really - mostly just the A-list actors. What bothers me isn’t their posturing, their preening, or their living in giant houses that God could not have possibly intended when He cobbled together our mudball of a planet.

After all, opulence is part of the job. Being an A-list actor involves just as much driving cool cars, laying around on expensive beaches, and panty-flashing as it does acting in movies, some of which are occasionally required to be good.

Good or not, the public loves seeing the same easily recognizable faces on the big screen. Why this is, I couldn’t really say, but I can say that most big studio movies in this day and age do not star actors.

Actors are people who convincingly and dramatically pretend to be other people. This sort of pretence, however, is impossible to a large degree for most A-list celebrities. Rather, they play themselves pretending to be other people. When all is said and done, celebrities are paid to be celebrities.

And that is fine. It makes me jealous, to some degree, that other people my age or younger are being paid vast sums of money for just being the sort of people that are paid vast sums of money. After all, I’ve never been paid simply for being myself (1).

While with enough therapy (I.e. drinking and befriending genuinely ugly people), I have learned to get past most of it, I’m still not entirely Zen on this subject. There are a few things about celebrities that get under my skin. Two, really. Read More »

By Joe Hormes | Posted in Columnist, Entertainment, humor, movies, music | Comments (0)

America, Victorious

September 8, 2008 – 8:46 am

One late night during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, as the swimmer Michael Phelps smashed yet another world record, I walked through Philadelphia thinking over its history and was struck by how well it represents what America stands for.

Philadelphia is the birthplace of the American Democracy. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were both written there. The city’s most famous landmark - The Liberty Bell - sits in the aptly named Independence Hall and one of the museums is named after Ben Franklin, one of the most popular founding fathers.

The city also served as the first capital of the country. It has also been home to some of the most progressive minority groups. Read More »

By Ali Eteraz | Posted in Columnist, Society, essays, movies, north america, sports | Comments (1)

I Believe in the Joker (While “The Dark Knight” Rakes In the Profit)

September 6, 2008 – 5:44 am

Unless you are just now joining civilization, you may have heard of a little film called “Batman: The Dark Knight.” It is not the first Batman film, of course; the popular character from the comic books has been in several before now.

What we are asked to believe, however, about director Christopher Nolan’s new Bat-films – this one and “Batman Begins” – is that they have a special quality of serious crime films containing Political and Philosophical Themes (while the 60s film is knockabout farce, the 80s film an extended Depeche Mode video, and the 90s films simply too 90s to be tolerated).

Mountains of cultural studies essays have been written about this topic already, so I won’t bore you with too much that you can read elsewhere. You probably know the basic argument as to what makes the film ‘right-wing’: the focus is entirely on getting revenge on the criminals of the community, rather than on looking at the community and asking why it produces criminals (an obvious truism – but why obvious?).

What I find interesting – quite apart from the exciting and noisy car-chases, beatings and gun-fights, which always seem such fun when they happen on film – is the extent to which this film has been complacently allowed into the wrong genre and the claims of its advertisers believed. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Entertainment, essays, movies, politics | Comments (1)

Reel Positions

September 4, 2008 – 8:18 am

A Mermaid named Nala
Met with Jessie the Rabbit
To discuss what the Old Adage say.
While sharing a laugh
For each less than better half
(Fixed Fools who were long drawn away),
They pushed through the portal
Of the detailed dwelling
Of Wally the Wolf at bay.
He showed them his knife,
They giggled more than twice,
As he outlined why they should stay: Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Arts & Literature, movies, poetry | Comments (0)

Cold War Revisited: “Red Dawn”

September 1, 2008 – 8:35 am

As certain factions speculate that the world is headed toward a new Cold War, Mark Farnsworth examines the artistic legacy of this phenomenon.

Director, screenwriter, and producer John Milius has always fancied himself as a latter day Hemingway, a warrior-poet on the board of directors of the NRA, fiercely opposed to gun control, and a consultant for the deceptively named military think tank - the Center for Creative Technology. A member of the 70s movie brats alongside Lucas, Spielberg, and Scorcese, Milius is the man responsible for the finer moments in “Jaws,” “Magnum Force,” and “Apocalypse Now.” His heroes are Patton, MacArthur, and Roosevelt; not your average right-wing American icons, but mavericks, tyrants, and visionary leaders.

The film critic David Thompson wrote of Milius as having, “earned and even provoked the press reputation of a strident, magnum-brandishing reactionary. But he is more than that. He is an anarchist, he is articulate, and he has an unshakable faith in human grandeur.” This would seem true from his directorial efforts, “Dillinger,” “Conan The Barbarian,” and “The Wind and the Lion.” Yet “Red Dawn” is a rather strange nut to crack.

“Red Dawn” is the ultimate ‘what if?’ movie. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Entertainment, europe, movies, north america, politics | Comments (0)

Cold War Revisited: “The Thing”

August 24, 2008 – 10:33 am

As certain factions speculate that the world is headed toward a new Cold War, Mark Farnsworth examines the artistic legacy of this phenomenon.

“The Thing” is the darkest film in the Kurt Russell trilogy of Carpenter’s science fiction films and the beginning of his “Apocalypse” cycle. It is a master class of pessimism nearly unrivalled in cinema and a bleak critique on the nature of humanity itself, inspired by the Reagan administration, Carpenter’s first foray into studio film making, and the escalation of the arms race with the Soviet Union.

The plot is more closely related to John W. Campbell’s novella; “Who Goes There?” than the earlier Hawks production of “The Thing from another World.” Special effects allow the shape-shifting alien to be realised in all its bloody glory, which in turn gives Carpenter the freedom to develop a claustrophobic atmosphere of mistrust, fear, and growing nihilism.

In the earlier movie the scientists and soldiers work together to destroy the visible threat of the thing, as they would do with communism. There is a unity mostly derived from the fact that they are white and embody a people fresh from the moral victory in WW2. America in the 1950s was still perceived as the ‘good guys’, the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’.

With Carpenter’s creature everyone could be the thing and, as a consequence, an enemy. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Arts & Literature, Entertainment, movies, north america, politics | Comments (0)

The Epic Abomination of “Sex and the City”

August 16, 2008 – 10:27 am

When challenged to use the word horticulture in a sentence the writer, poet, and critic Dorothy Parker retorted, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”

Parker, the acid-tongued queen of New York wrote in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker in the early turbulent part of the 20th century, commenting on everything from politics to literature, before eventually writing screenplays in Hollywood. In the early part of the 21st century beset by the war on terror, oil hitting $135 barrel, and global warming, New York has…Carrie Bradshaw.

Now, the “Sex and the City” series at least played like a well-written article: sharp, rude, forgettable and perfectly made to fit the 30-minute format. The movie is too long to be an episode and too short to reflect the achievements of a series.

Four years on from the series’ end Bradshaw is no longer writing for the New York Observer, but plying her trade with “maginatively” titled books like Menhattan. Get it? Because, in this film that’s as good as it gets. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Entertainment, movies, racism, sex | Comments (2)

Thanks, Hollywood! The Joy of Unneeded Sequels

August 1, 2008 – 2:52 pm

We see it on blogs, websites, magazines. We hear it on radio shows. We even comment on it to each other. Believe me, I know how cliché it is to say that Hollywood is out of ideas. But in that same vein, it’s also cliché to say things like “Gravity points down,” or “1=1”. So you see what I‘m getting at.

Now, historically, Hollywood has always done one of two things: it has produced good movies or really bad movies. Some of the more baroque and stylistically bad movies were passed off as good movies, everyone swigged some red wine that they all secretly didn’t care for, and everyone did their best to ignore the fact that the Oscars should only be held once every four years. However, the new trend that has emerged in these last few years is far more forbidding.

These days, the directors and producers are all either remaking or producing horrible sequels to any film they can lay their grubby hands on. In effect, this takes every single movie from the past few decades and makes them all worse. The good movies we’ve enjoyed for so long are shot in the back of the head and toppled into unmarked graves near lonely metaphorical highways. The bad movies are actually brought back from the dead as slavering zombies, cursed in the sight of God (not a metaphor; every theater that played the new Pink Panther should have been required to sell wooden stakes and pieces of the One True Cross at the concession stand). Read More »

By Joe Hormes | Posted in Columnist, Entertainment, humor, movies | Comments (3)

My Superhero Dream Team: Prepare For Glory!

June 11, 2008 – 11:42 am

Like most men, I have very limited insight into the higher neurological functions of the American female. So, as far as discussing the themes that women find appealing in their television and movies, I have to take a scientific approach and only hypothesize about why the ladies like the things they like.

I do know what escapist fantasies dudes harbor, and why. We crave excitement, adventure, speed, and an unprecedented level of nudity. We crave movies based on comic books or similarly unrealistic premises. And summer blockbusters love to oblige us.

They don’t delve into the possible downsides of being incredibly wealthy, intelligent, and having your own cybernetic battlesuit with rockets in the arms and emergency flares in the nipples. There’s just the right amount of adversity; a prosaic and straight-forward evil villain generally puts the hero in a tough spot, and then forces the hero to do something epic. Not so secretly, my ilk envies the hero. We would love to clench our fists and solemnly vow not to rest until justice is delivered to every ass within a 2 mile radius via our mighty feet.

But movies aren’t enough for me anymore. As a dude, the appeal of watching a crime-fighting, justice-avenging hero has simply become mundane. As such, I’ve designed my own super team.

I’ve put a lot of though into this. A lot. For instance, as many of you may not know, there is inevitably a rivalry between the team leader and the resident loose cannon that doesn’t play by the rules and goes his own way.

That will not be an issue here, however, as I plan to be both the leader and the loose cannon. I might sometimes disagree with myself, but I’m sure I’ll be able to resolve the issue by dropping giant boulders onto myself, and then watching them shatter on my abs. Additionally, my biceps will be named Zeus and Odin, and they will probably star in their own spin-off movies. Read More »

By Joe Hormes | Posted in Columnist, Entertainment, football, humor, internet, movies, music, politics, video games | Comments (0)