Category: FILMS&TV

Chico and Rita (2010)

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There’s a saying that in an SF story, the science should be one of the characters. Well, that’s also true in a jazz story: in any film about music, the music needs to be so present, so powerful, that it ends up being one of the characters itself. Happily, Chico and Rita gets that right–along with a lot of other things. It’s a tragedy, of course, but a tragedy of a specific kind. You could come at it from any number of angles, and of course the film itself suggests some of them: the opening suggests the tragedy of the …

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Jim Henson Called It, I Swear He Did…

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The Muppets have been on my mind, ever since Mrs. Jiwaku started working on a painting which is, essentially, a mash-up of the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink with Jim Henson’s Muppet characters. And you’ll probably be wondering what The Muppets have to do with bigotry, though I swear, if you stick with it, it’ll make sense. (And no, I’m not talking about the recent Muppet movie and racial coding of characters. I’m talking about Jim Henson as a political subversive, something I talked about in my classes, but am pretty sure I haven’t posted about here before.)

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Despite All the Nostalgia for the 1980s…

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… that seems to be cropping up these days, it’s not a post-80s world we live in. It’s in the shadow of the Baby Boomer Generation that we dwell, today: their politics, their economics, their morality, their paradigm. This insight I ran across on the Ivebeenreading blog in a post about a piece elsewhere where Kent Jones “takes after Quentin Tarantino for a poorly thought-out slam of John Ford.” It’s curious that American culture and history are still so commonly viewed through a New Left prism, by means of which 1964 or thereabouts has become a Year Zero of political enlightenment; …

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Iron Man 3

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Iron Man 3 isn’t out in the US, so I suppose I should put some kind of spoiler warning on it… since we saw it this morning. (The film was released today in Vietnam.) So, consider yourself spoiler-warned: If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t read past here: bookmark it and come back when  you have seen the film. Unless you are the sort of person who doesn’t mind spoilers, that is.

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