Stop Frame

Southland Tales is that special movie that made me appreciate all the more the subtle charms, intense relationships, tight plotting, and vivid characters of Dragon Wars . It would be easy to dismiss Southland as an extreme example of what happens when filmmakers succumb to Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS), but that would be giving them an easy out. No, Southland is the result of a writer-director ego gone wild, serving only itself, and refusing to actually, you know, make a film. D-Wars has more respect for the audience, and D-Wars , just for the records, stank on ice. Southland is from Richard Kelly , the same man who brought us Donnie Darko , a movie which kept you trying to figure out what the in hell is going on right up until then end, when all very neatly came together. Whether Donnie worked for you or not (and it did for me), it tried to tie everything up. In Southland , Kelly plainly didn't give a crap. Anyone reading deeper meaning into anything within this film i...

I'm sort of a David Mamet fan. I qualify that because it's not as if I leap out and see every single thing he creates. I've never seen one of his plays on stage. If he's ever written a book, I've never read it. But I've seen a fair number of his films, and even the ones with mediocre plots are fascinating. Besides, his wife is smoking hot. Sexist? Absolutely, but she is and that's that. I've always assumed he was a flaming liberal, and it would appear that I was correct. Despite that, one thing that always attracted me to his work is a sense of a inherent honesty. You watch his film The Winslow Boy and you know a liberal probably couldn't stand the traditions presented within the academy, yet Mamet treats them with due deference and respect. Thus he demonstrated that whatever his personal opinion, he was willing to explore both sides of an issue. And now I read his startling conversion (as it were) in The Village Voice and there's a sens...

The era of nonpartisan science is gone, says Miller, who urges scientists and science educators to learn the rules of this new game and get behind moderate Republicans as well as Democrats to protect the practice and teaching of sound science. I stumbled across this article and came away bemused, confused, and, ultimately, amused. Bemused that the author thinks this is something new. Confused at yet another article decrying the politicizing of science while focusing only on the right's use of science. Amused at the attitude that this is something terrifying. The trend is decades old. Consider Silent Spring . Its "science" was tenuous at best, especially its assault on DDT, but it was the major springboard for the entire environmental movement, which at its heart and soul ( Ha! ) is a left-wing assault on capitalism. The entire movement is based on gross exaggeration of findings and outright fabrications. They make wild claims based on the most tenuous of data -- ...

I'm not really sure where all the Microsoft hate comes from, but I suspect it's mostly a function of MacFanboi jealousy over the fact that 95% of the people purchasing personal computers don't choose a Macintosh. As a defense mechanism they must assert their superiority at every turn and do so by snarking at Microsoft whenever possible, or even when it's impossible. I don't work for Microsoft. Never have, never will. As a company, it's far from perfect. Then again, the same can be said of Apple. Consider that Vista clearly stumbled in the marketplace yet Apple is incapable of moving fast enough to take advantage of that fact. This is mostly a function of Steve Jobs's obsessive control. That and when you take a step back you see that MS and Apple don't actually compete for the same market. How so, you ask? Simple: MS makes computer software. What few hardware items it makes are irrelevant to the company's overall focus, software. As such, MS must...