The Strong Silent Types
In Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson plays a washed up actress living as a recluse. When a stranger stumbles into her mansion, he pauses for a moment: "You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big."
Norma turns to ice. She hisses: "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." Like Norma Desmond, "the big pictures" still suffer from neglect. Conventional wisdom condemns them as clunky, boring, and saccharine—merely an appetizer for the real stuff: talkies. Even 2011's novelty silent film, The Artist, treats the medium as a relic of the past—a technology to be transcended, rather than a genre worthy of notice. That's unfortunate, because it means dismissing an entire field of classics. Read more. |
Top 10 Best Brit Detective Shows, Ever
The trailer for the new adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is just weird. For one thing, Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot, trim and blond, looks very little like Christie’s rotund, black-haired sleuth. He overdoes the mustache, adorning his face with an enormous, Chester Alan Arthur monstrosity. The hodgepodge of a cast features everything from aging British thespians to American B-list actors to Broadway stars to . . . wait, Johnny Depp? And then it’s capped off with an Imagine Dragons track. For a minute, it almost looks like a prequel to Snowpiercer.
Even so, it’s nice to see Hollywood making an old-fashioned Golden Age mystery, because we don’t get many of them on the big screen. But on the little screen, it’s a different story. On TV there are more British detectives than you can shake a stick at. Here’s a definitive ranking of the ten best. Read more. |
Peter Sallis, 1921 - 2017
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Wonder Woman So Woke |
Deconstructing Star Wars |
Actor Peter Sallis died on Monday at the age of 96. Sallis was best known for voicing Wallace in the Wallace and Gromit films, as well as serving as a regular performer in the world's longest-running sitcom, Last of the Summer Wine.
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There's something about kids: their wide-eyed innocence, their unimpeachable earnestness, their progressive ideas about gender politics. After all, as everyone knows, elementary school students are the foremost political thinkers the internet has to offer.
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Star Wars’ roots in mythology are so well-established that they have become a sort of legend in themselves: Somewhere in a hallowed office in the ’70s, George Lucas, poring the ancient pages of Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces, struck the molten iron of the sci-fi zeitgeist to create a new myth, a fantasy set in the stars, with futuristic light sabers and a misty philosophy which feels like long, long ago.
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The Truth is Out There: Faith and Reason in The X-Files
When, in 1993, FOX commissioned a TV show called The X-Files, they had little idea it would still be running 23 years later. An unexpected hit, it became the definitive cultural touchstone of the ’90s, uniting political paranoia with cinematic aspirations — drawing from conspiracy literature and Spielbergian sci-fi. Misty pine forests, eerie lights in the night sky, cigarette-smoking men in black, government warehouses hiding “The Truth.” It had atmosphere by the bucketful, and a central relationship powerful enough to propel the show through nine seasons.
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3 Questions Christians Should Ask About Civil Disobedience
...it’s not hard to see why Christians gravitate to tales of defiance and civil disobedience, imagining wish-fulfillment victories over our cultural opponents. Films like Braveheart, The Patriot, and God’s Not Dead resonate for a reason.
And along come the Bundys, heroic frontiersmen facing off with the faceless feds. Automatically, Christians were inclined to sympathize with old-fashioned revolutionaries, standing, they claimed, for God and the American way. Or is it that simple? Read more. |
Selection of Movie Reviews:
Cultural CommentaryCultural commentary, reporting, and TV criticism for The Weekly Standard.
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Faith and CultureThoughts on religion and current events for Summit Ministries.
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LiteratureReflections on art and life for The Torrey Gazette.
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