•Cirque du Soleil, originally from Quebec, may be trying too hard to seem New Yorky with their new show based here: flappers, jazz dance, Vaudeville, urban motifs — and it’s called
Banana Shpeel.
•George Lucas just had to go and “improve” his original Star Wars trilogy with various digital enhancements and lame prequels — but, despite his [...]
A colleague points out this unusually slick and funny anti-government song parody from last year, Tim Hawkins’ “The Government Can,” based on “The Candy Man.” Given how much mileage the left gets out of priding itself on having the edge in hipness and irony, we need more of this. A half-century ago, they thought they [...]
Afraid things will be crowded tonight at, say, the Broadway and 68th IMAX theatre if you try to see Tim Burton’s visually delightful and adventure-film-intense version of Alice in Wonderland? Then why not join me a few blocks away at 2 West 64th St., where the Ethical Culture Society will be taking a trip [...]
Tonight’s our big Debate at Lolita Bar on the question “Is Christianity for Wimps?” — and one question sure to arise is whether wimps are, in fact, bad. Take our level of tolerance for violence as an example.
Surely, violence manifests itself in all sorts of horrible ways (else we would have no police and [...]
It’s disappointing that a movie of Atlas Shrugged with Angelina Jolie didn’t quite happen — and that we’ll never see the ad campaign that likely would have resulted, with Jolie accompanied by the question “WHO IS JOHN GALT?” In what may be just an odd coincidence, Jolie is now being seen in ads for her [...]
Here’s something with political ramifications we can discuss tonight at Manhattan Project (6:30 at Merchants NY East) or tomorrow after my Rand speech at Yale (6pm at Harkness Hall, Room 119): nerd-beloved director Kevin Smith was ousted from a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat. A side effect of creeping health-nannyism, or exactly [...]
Well, the Phillips Foundation gathering scheduled for New York City today fell through because Washingtonians are afraid of snow — whereas little can stop the mighty engine of commerce that is my town, or at least there’s no need to worry that some residual slush will prevent unemployed bankers picking up their welfare checks and [...]
Tonight, at last, I finally see the recent mini-series remake of The Prisoner. Will it be as libertarian — almost Randian — in tone as the original? Or will it sadden me in the same way that recent talk of making a “green technology”-themed Tom Swift movie did?
Mere hours after noting Milton Friedman’s grandson in yesterday’s entry, I watched the man himself debating school choice on an old Firing Line DVD (up against Al Shanker and other anti-choice villains). Milton could fight even bigger battles very effectively, of course (while wisely avoiding the kind of foundational philosophical arguments that draw a few [...]
I was always the sort of nerd who, once he decided he liked some TV show, saw every episode and remembered all the plotlines — thus, too, my musings on comic book continuity in more than one entry on this blog over the past three years.
At some point in the past few years, though, I [...]
This has been a pivotal week in my relationship with a loved one: I mean, of course, Fox News. I will have appeared briefly on their spin-off Fox Business Network twice, the second time in just over an hour, as I type this, since I’ll be seen defending Twinkie consumption at the very end of [...]
Actor Ernest Borgnine turned ninety-three yesterday. From the Poseidon to Airwolf, the freaky-visaged actor has served us well. Last year, at ninety-two, he starred in the film Another Harvest Moon.
This reminds me, though, of a likely injustice: Years ago, when my friend Ali Kokmen was in the habit of leading several of us to a [...]
Lionsgate bought the auctioned-off rights to the entire Terminator franchise recently for a mere $15 million from its financially beleaguered owners. I have four reactions:
(1) Now that James Cameron has even more money, I wonder if he wishes he’d found time to buy the killer-cyborg series he created.
(2) Joss Whedon put in a joke bid [...]
I mentioned yesterday Spider-Man 4 being scuttled over the studio’s resistance to having the villain be John Malkovich as the Vulture. This means, in a way, that a conservative destroyed Spider-Man, since apparently John Malkovich is “so right-wing you have to wonder if he’s kidding” and once clarified his joking comments about wanting to [...]
…the genre-film prima donna of the century so far.
Almost Aragorn. Almost Fandral. Maybe he should storm off the set of, say, a Narnia film in a couple years (but his is not the biggest genre-movie meltdown of the week, since it appears the Vulture, who the studio was pressuring Sam Raimi NOT to [...]