I wouldn't argue that social media hasn't had its share of harmful effects on children, political discourse, and the social behaviors of people around the world, but I would argue that any assumption that our problems began with social media are simple minded and patently false. When it comes to the point mentioned early on' "If you aren't the customer, you are the product," well, yes. I try to avoid too much clicking on things that I otherwise have no…
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllPinned reviews
More-
-
A Special Day 1977
The day certainly doesn't start out very special, as Antoinetta (Loren) seems to be methodically engaged in a same old, same old routine of thankless service to a family that barely registers that she's even there. But today is a special day because Adolph Hitler is coming to town to celebrate Italy and Germany's shared fascist Utopian dream. She won't be going to the massive jerk fest because six kids and an inattentive husband leave her to clean up the…
Recent reviews
More-
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 2023
A stunning sendoff, with some great action and the humor that characterized 1 & 2, but it also gets a bit bogged down in Disney territory at times. Look, I'm happy to know about Rocket's tough background, and it does help us understand his own peculiar seeming motivations, but maybe Gunn went a bit overboard on the sentimentality juice. Thankfully, it's not a buzzkill, because everything else puts us right back into our ragtag group of defenders. Since Rocket spends the…
-
First Man 2018
This isn't going to replace The Right Stuff for me, but there are a couple incredibly harrowing, you are there scenes that beat anything else I've seen in this type of story. Gosling plays Neil Armstrong as a pretty buttoned-up guy. His wife Jan (Claire Foy) and him lose their baby daughter, Karen early on, and we can see how impossible he finds it to discuss it, or express his feelings about it. Because the work that he and his…
Popular reviews
More-
Show Boat 1936
Watching the excellent Criterion Blu-ray presentation of James Whale's groundbreaking filming of Edna Ferber's equally groundbreaking novel turned musical, Show Boat, it made me ponder how ripe this is for a new production that could address the issues that Whale was unable to. This musical, and this production were pioneering in their time; the first musical to truly integrate a story, with songs that furthered character development, as well as the first with a story that tackled issues beyond “the…
-
Seconds 1966
CRITERION CHALLENGE 2021
boxd.it/aTsfO
#14 of 52
If you want your dreams to come true, then you first need to have dreams. Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph)doesn't seem like a guy that dreams much beyond what he was told that he should want, and now that he has achieved it, he feels hollowed out. If he had ever gotten beyond job, wife, house (birth, school, work, death) none of this would have been a temptation in the first place. But he…
