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I love this illusion.

From a recent post on Slashdot: …”Batman can’t really afford to lose. Losing means death — or at least not being able to be Batman anymore.” I had never thought of it before, but, yes, the implicit pleasure in any such masked hero movie is that he cannot lose. Losing means either death or being [...]

Batman: The Dark Knight. 152 minutes. PG-13. All the people who made the movie must have gotten paid by the minute. Except for the writers.* (Their share may have been siphoned off to the MPAA.) It’s a great movie in the tradition of cinema as experience (the IMAX version is doing gangbusters) marred by lazy [...]

It had been at least a dozen years since I last saw Paris is Burning and it was even better than I remembered it. A clear portrait of a powerful culture, the movie is tightly structured with brilliant, pithy interviews. One of the most important movies I’ve seen and one I will revisit every decade.

This is what happens when you have a real opposition party: Over the last ten days or so, the President and the McCain campaign (who are clearly working in coordination, as they’re entirely entitled to do) have been systematically drawing back from their positions on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran and either fully embracing or moving [...]

El Cantante: a montage in search of a screenplay.

This morning as I was driving our stick shift car to work I heard a noise from the clutch. I was on the freeway so I raised the windows and listened more carefully. There it was. A short white noise, like the sound of windshield wipers making a single pass. It only happened when I [...]

This is cursory judgment but no less informed than much of what I hear from pundits on television. According to this book review, cited by Matthew Yglesias, the new book by Jane Mayer on America’s descent into the ranks of states that imprison without due process and torture without aim is: 1) over-compensation by the [...]

Ouch: Yet, now that he is the presumptive nominee, Obama is standing not with Feingold, but with Bush and the special interests Obama once denounced. He says he’ll vote for a White House-backed FISA rewrite — which is likely to be taken up by the Senate this week — in opposition to the position taken [...]

We just threw away $7 of perfectly good chicken because it was left out during a bbq and the thought of the waste is killing me. You can take the boy out of Cuba…