The Rowling affair: Our ignorance, narcissism, and neo-Stalinism reflected back at us
JK Rowling is no TERF, no matter the neo-Stalinist cant being promoted by the Google-media-Wikipedia disinformation network.
Posts
The Mysterians: Yankee go home?
Japanese Mysterians film likely carried an anti-imperialist, anti-American message under standard SF cliches of the era.
Jane Austen: not ‘great literature’
The novels of Jane Austen are not great literature for their naïve and narrow conception of the world, which approaches propaganda.
The Glass Key (1942)
Stuart Heisler’s screen adaptation of Dashiell Hammet’s The Glass Key gives us a character study of the noir anti-hero as descended from Eve and the original sin.
Crossfire (1947)
Edward Dmytryk’s 1947 Crossfire courageously attacks the bigotry of antisemitism and, more subtly, homophobia, on a shoestring budget but with outstanding performances.
Citizen Kane (1941)
Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) is not quite the unsurpassed masterpiece often claimed, but it is nevertheless a considerable cinematic achievement.
In the news … October/November 2021
Commentary on the news, current affairs, journalism, and the news media landscape more generally for October 2021.
Laura 1944
Laura (1944) is an entertaining murder mystery melodrama, highly acclaimed in its own time, but not really a film noir as uncritically and widely claimed today.
In the news … May 2021
Commentary on the news, current affairs, journalism, and the news media landscape more generally for May 2021.
In the news … April 2021
Commentary on the news, current affairs, journalism, and the news media landscape more generally for April 2021.
Spellbound (1945)
Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound remains captivating, though contexts have changed for genres, subject, and artistic treatment.
Notes on Appiah’s Lévi-Strauss
Kwame Anthony Appiah’s New York Review of Books essay on Claude Lévi-Strauss confirm my old antipathies to his work, but also reveal some new façets to me.
In the news … March 2021
Commentary on current affairs, the news media, and the the state of journalism generally for March 2021.
Morrison and Freud: What’s on his mind?
What could a Freudian perspective reveal to us about the angry Scott Morrison thrashing about for an end to his sexual assault and harassment problem.
Does left arrogance drive right extremism?
Translating Thomas Frank’s editorial about arrogant American ‘liberals’ for Australian audiences reveals a very unflattering picture of local left elitism.