Computer security is big money these days. It’s also quite probably impossible.
Category Archives: reblogs
Reading the Landscape: 45
RIP Watchung, NJ Sears.
As unlikely as it was, your Legend of Watchung mural was part of what sparked my interest in history. I hope the town preserves it.
In Praise of The Gong Show
Chuck Barris, the creator of The Gong Show, has died at the age of 87.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/chuck-barris-dead-gong-show-929310
As an early Gen Xer, I remember watching The Gong Show on television when I come home for lunch from school. But, as readers of Writers Without Money know from Daniel Levine’s great appreciation of The Gong Show last year, Chuck Barris also touched the millennial generation.
RIP Chuck. I won’t use that silly “Rest in Power” sendoff the left uses whenever a beloved celebrity dies, but I will say “rest with a paper bag over your head.” We all know you were really the Unknown Comic.
Money Hates Your Heineken and Wants to Fuck
A perennial favorite, now with the images updated!
Winter’s Bone (2010)
I saw Winter’s Bone when it first came out in 2010 and I’ve been meaning to review it for a while. For some reason I’ve never gotten around to it.
Winter’s Bone (still Jennifer Lawrence’s best film) is a much better introduction to the white underclass than J. D. Vance’s overly hyped Hillbilly Elegy, and a much better movie than any of the films in the blockbuster Hunger Games series. There isn’t a bad performance in the whole film. John Hawkes is especially good as a violent meth cooker who nevertheless manages to find his conscience.
I’m personally not as pessimistic about Ree Dolly’s eventual fate as this review. By shaming her extended family into leading her to her father’s body (and saving her family’s house), Ree (in spite of her youth) takes her fate into her own hands. I see her eventually either escaping the Ozarks or becoming a leader in her community.
I’d also love to see Dale Dickey — who plays an older woman who first attempts to terrorize Ree out of searching for her father, but ends up helping her — get more roles.
She had a brief but vivid part in Breaking Bad (where she kills her husband by pushing an ATM machine on his head) and is one of the best things about Winter’s Bone. She could be the Jane Darwell of this era. Sadly she’ll probably get stuck doing an occasional bit part here and there.
City of God (2002) – The Violence of Poverty
This is a more detailed review of City of God than my own.
It also deals with a question that I decided perhaps a little too easily: Is it possible to be a good person inside the City of God?
The Devil’s Chessboard (2015)
Now that so many liberal Democrats have suddenly begun to see the CIA as their saviors against Vladimir Putin, we should probably remind ourselves what the CIA is really all about.
October (1928)
I’ve been methodically going through the cinema of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and have come to the conclusion that it’s never been surpassed, that Hollywood’s ultimate victory (even the French make American style blockbusters these days) was the ultimate artistic tragedy.
I’ve seen October three times now, once as a college junior in a political science class, a second time in the Winter of 2014 (after which I wrote this review), and just last night (to prepare for a review of Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg). Each time I come away even more astonished at Eisenstein’s greatness. This is what cinema is all about.
A Generation (1954)
A Generation was Andrzej Wajda’s fist major film, made in 1954 when he was 28 years old, the year after Stalin’s death. It is heavily influenced by orthodox Marxism, but as with his later, anti-communist, films, it’s too complex to be put in a box.