One of the pleasures of attending a good film festival — and there are many — is that you never know what you’re going to get. You’ll see first-time directors whose work is entirely new, leaving you with nothing to compare it to; you’ll see films that will likely play …
The inexorable march of the Marvel Cinematic Universe* goes on, and its latest manifestation is the Netflix series Luke Cage. Debuting earlier this month, it stars Mike Colter as the black Harlem-based action hero, based on the bruising ’70s comic book creation and brought to life by Cheo Hodari Coker. Luke …
Christopher Guest is a divisive figure in the comedy world. The comedies he makes with his stock company of gifted improvisers — ranging from This is Spinal Tap to For Your Consideration — tend to be loved by critics and fans, but Guest also has a reputation (well-earned, from my personal experience) as a difficult …
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think of the Paris Commune as one of the pivotal events in human history. It was not only one of the first, but still is one of the most audacious experiments in equality, freedom, and liberation from oppression that has ever …
High-concept sit-coms are hard to pull off. Setting a half-hour, joke-heavy TV show in anything but an ordinary setting requires an awful lot of heavy lifting: not only do you have to spend a lot of time and effort on stuff like sets and costumes, but you also need to …
Respectability politics had what may be its grandest moment yesterday when an office being rented by the Republican Party of North Carolina suffered fire damage after someone threw a Molotov cocktail through a window. Barely had the embers cooled than a group of Democrats — yes, Democrats — started an online …
Polls are frivolous, untrustworthy, and based on inherently flawed methods. They have only heightened the horse-race nature of elections, further sportified our political process, and cause enormous amounts of anxiety in a race that is already painfully stressful. That said, if almost every recent poll is any indication and we …
Last night’s debate between centrist plutocrat Hillary Clinton and (in comedian John Mulaney’s nice phrase) amateur-night pimp Donald Trump wasn’t particularly instructive, but it certainly seems to have thrown a significant portion of the populace into a tizzy. The ‘town hall’ format, allowing as it did for hooting orangutans and …
Two of the most frequently encountered modalities in the modern world of television comedy share a common weakness: the way the negative personalities of the main characters tend to get in the way of the laughs. Comedies centered around protagonists with mental illness can succeed, and the genre has produced …
A lot of people I know seem to think that you can’t possibly object to Hillary Clinton’s campaign based strictly on ideological differences, so I’m often called upon to make penance by saying that Donald Trump is bad. I feel like I’ve said that enough; I had a piece published …
Well, look at this! It’s the night of the very first and very exciting presidential debate, in which Hillary Clinton, a woman who embodies the American ideal that if you want something really bad people should give it to you and not ask a lot of annoying questions, and Donald …
When Donald Glover was making the rounds to publicize the first season of Atlanta, the new FX series he created, produced, wrote, and stars in, he made a comment that has come to be the log line for the series: he claimed he wanted to make a show about what it’s like …
The release last week of Census data concerning recent trends in employment in the economy has been widely circulated, not only as evidence that things are getting better, but that we have our nation’s Democratic leadership to thank for that. In a particular partisan view, the country is doing fine, …
So another handful of ‘polls’ have been released, which seem to indicated that presidential heir apparent Hillary Clinton has failed to charm the electorate and that Chee-To-dusted stray stem cell Donald Trump is closing the ‘gap’ which allegedly exists between them. Many explanations have been offered for this development: It’s all …
Guilt has always been a major theme in noir fiction. Everyone is guilty to some degree or another, and even if they aren’t, what does being innocent get you? Fate will always find a way to trip you up, so you might as well be guilty. The flip side of …
