Tim Burton is not a filmmaker. You can be forgiven for the confusion that previous sentence created, but let me explain. Tim Burton isn’t someone interested in making movies in the traditional sense. Instead, he’s an artist. He’s more focused on eliciting an emotional response as opposed to telling a story, and he uses the […]

Comics are a lot like life. Sometimes you feel like you’re on cloud nine, swinging through the world without a care in the world. Kinda like Spider-Man. Sometimes you feel like you’re the Good Lord’s personal cat toy. Also kinda like Spider-Man! And sometimes? Sometimes things are so screwy and tangled up that the only […]

We say that all lives have value. Do they? If so, what exactly is that value? To ponder a question like that is, at best, distasteful. At worst, it’s a monstrous concept that’s so big, it almost can’t be grappled with. But someone has to. Someone has to take the decisions and idiosyncrasies that live […]

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is streaming on Netflix There’s a long and semi-proud tradition in Hollywood of the courtroom movie. Some of them, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Verdict, and 12 Angry Men stand the test of time.* They have something particular to say about the law, about justice, and how […]

It’s hard to make a good movie. It’s even harder to make a good superhero movie, and Marvel Studios makes it look so easy. Through intelligence, wit, and sheer perseverance, not unlike their flagship character, they have become the gold standard in popular film entertainment. The Marvel movies stand above every other franchise, even the Star […]

Not long ago, I read the incredible book “Strangers in their Own Land,” by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. She visited Louisiana and interviewed scads of people to ask them about their voting habits. Specifically, she wanted to find out why these decent and smart people continually voted against their own interests. If you lived […]

There’s an old expression* you’ve probably heard that says, “May you live in interesting times.” We have the misfortune to live in interesting times, particularly when several of the seemingly indestructible institutions of our society are crumbling before our eyes. One of those institutions is print journalism. After Woodward and Bernstein raked Nixon over the […]