Crisis is streaming on Prime Years ago, I was driving to the low-pay, high-stress job I held at the time. I turned my head to check my blind spot and, being an imbecile, I somehow screwed up my back.* The pain was quite serious, so much so that I got to work, then reconsidered and went to an ER. After the ER doctor helpfully concluded that I tweaked my back, he gave me a prescription for Codeine and sent me home. I remember how it felt once the Codeine took effect. I felt like I was literally melting into my chair, and I was so relaxed that the Manson Family could have burst through the door and... Read More

Mank is streaming on Netflix France has Voltaire, Simone de Beauvoir, Marcel Proust, and so many others. They’re justifiably proud of the literary output of their citizens, with thousands of pages waxing rhapsodic about philosophy, the arts, politics, and so much more. Not to be outdone is England, with immortal wordsmiths like Douglas Adams, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and the 800-pound gorilla in the room, William Shakespeare. You know what country, deep down in its bones, doesn’t really care about writers? That would be the good old United States of America. It’s appalling, considering... Read More

I know, I owe you an explanation. A laundry movie is a film that you can see in the theater, though you probably shouldn’t. Instead, it’s a film that plays in the background while you’re folding laundry, making out, checking social media, or doing essentially anything else. You can check out for a while, but upon hearing a quip or an explosion, your attention can return to the screen and you can easily pick the thread of the story back up. As long as there has been Hollywood, there have been laundry movies. Nobody means to make a laundry movie, it just kinda happens sometimes.... Read More

From 1978 to 1990, Andrei Chikatilo murdered at least 52 women and children in Soviet Russia. Putting aside the grim fact that it’s fiendishly difficult to capture a serial killer under any circumstances, Chikatilo enjoyed a unique advantage. It was widely believed in Soviet circles that murder in general, and serial murder in particular, was a uniquely Western phenomenon that couldn’t possibly occur in the USSR. Blinded by ideology, investigators instead persecuted innocent homosexuals, believing homosexuality to be a dangerous mental illness. Good thing nothing like that ever happens... Read More