If I should die in a wombat zone

June 20, 2018 Review of Jagged Little Pill, the musical (Aka, “everybody hurts”…and lets you know at very loud punk volumes) As appropriate to a musical created as tribute to a Catholic songstress, I have a confession to make: Alanis Morisette’s music came at the most perfectly precarious and wounded, open moment of my youth, the freshest days and weeks and months after the breakup of a four year relationship that was the entire universe to my 18 year old moment in time. And here on the radio was someone who understood, who sang raw, blunt yet poetic lyrics about loss and rejection, anger and pain and empathy, as if to say, yes, yes it does mean the entire universe, and fuck yes you should take it that seriously…but with just enough distance (as her songs and albums progressed, she seemed to be just a tiny bit ahead down the road from where I was, the prefect long-distance mentor) to let me know there was light at the end of the tunnel. Not the light of paradise, n...

Dec 16, 2017 Star Wars: The Last Jedi – Review (I sense a great disturbance, as if a thousand spoilers were about to be revealed below…just so you know…) After “The Force Awakens” and “Rogue One” set such a high standard, I was expecting greatness from “The Last Jedi.” Fortunately, I was not disappointed. If anything, the film has taken its place as my second favorite of the series, next to “Empire Strikes Back,” to which “The Last Jedi” is spiritual successor. Much like in “Empire,” much of the film is spent with the heroes on the run from overwhelming odds, not only in physical combat but also in the struggle over who they are and who they want to be. It was a bold move to have most all the characters spend the movie in flight from an inevitably advancing foe, slowly getting worn down and killed off bit by bit. Much like “The Force Awakens,” it called on all manner of Star Wars tropes…and subverted them, in very clever (and often depressing) ways. Finn and Rose’s last...

In 1982, Blade Runner gave us dystopian future long before dystopian future scifi became commonplace, used as backdrop to make us ponder what it means to be human. It was a bold, arthouse style film with a questionably sympathetic protagonist and a surprisingly sympathetic villain, sporting a slow moving plot that wasn't really the point, dressed in amazing special effects that still hold up surprisingly well today. It's one of my favorite films of all time and I always shudder in our present era of re-treads when Hollywood revisits and revises the worlds of these classics. I am pleased to say that my worries in this case were unfounded. Blade Runner 2049 does an excellent (and highly disturbing, which is part of what makes it so excellent) job of continuing the "what does it mean to be human" theme, updated for our present era.  I loved the "retro-futurism" ... this 2049 clearly grew out of a 2019 that was envisioned in the 1980s. No internet, no cell ph...

So…Wonder Woman, 2017. I am impressed. Let’s get the obvious out of the way first, Gal Gadot is unspeakably gorgeous, yet plays Diana with such confidence and poise that indeed, as Sammy says, “you don’t know whether to be terrified or aroused.”   (And doesn’t that summarize the Israeli female soldier stereotype? Could a non-Israeli actress have pulled this off?) Yet at no time does Diana fall into the trap Heather MacDougal describes in her famous essay, “  I hate strong female characters ” – in other words, a woman who is ass-kicking but that’s all she is, the one-dimensional figure epitomized by Scarlet Johannsen’s Black Widow. Instead we see Diana through a wide range of states of being – confident, confused, curious, despairing – we see how her naïve honesty is precious, but also fuels a certain hubris, and isn’t that the quintessential Greek mythic flaw? Her romance with Steve begins as curiosity, cracks when she realizes that, gasp, he has flaws (as first lov...

Jar Jar Binks and the Crisis in American Democracy I’m not planning to vote for Donald Trump, but I can understand his appeal, and not just to racists and idiots. To help me explain this, I’m going to draw upon the most intellectually rigorous source material I can: the Star Wars movies. I’ve seen so many folks on the internet draw parallels between Trump and Senator Palpatine, and if you’re going to do that, I think you need to extend the metaphor to cover the entire setting of the films. Let’s examine the lead-up to that fateful moment when everyone’s favorite gungan, Jar Jar Binks, singlehandedly destroys the Republic by calling for the emergency powers vote. Examine, if you will, the state of the Republic prior to that moment: It was a freaking mess. There was so much political logjam in the Galactic Senate that when one member world actually launched a full-scale invasion and conquest of another, partisans in the Senate blocked the Chancellor’s attempt to even b...