Reading Time: 5 minutes Star Trek’s omnipotent prankster Q shows the folly of worshipping beings who possess superior power, but not superior morality or wisdom.
Film/TV
Exploring the world of film and television from a secular perspective.
Posted inFilm/TV
Review: ‘Hit the Road’ is a sharp-witted directorial debut
Reading Time: 2 minutes There was a tweet by critic Matt Singer that made the Internet rounds earlier this month consisting of a screenshot of available showtimes for the AMC theater in Times Square, all for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It’s a lot of showtimes. “This is not all of them,” Singer’s tweet reads, “I couldn’t […]
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‘Stanleyville’ thumbs nose at meritocracy, basically everything
Reading Time: 2 minutes Kisangani is a major commercial port city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Under Belgian colonization it was known as Stanleyville, after Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” fame. Stanley had been tapped by Belgian King Leopold II to establish a foothold for eventual annexation of the region. In 1897 […]
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Christian show ‘The Chosen’ vandalizes its own billboards to generate buzz
Reading Time: 4 minutes In an attempt to portray themselves as better than other forms of faith-based media, the producers of a new Christian TV show engaged in the most stereotypically evangelical scheme ever: They depicted themselves as victims of persecution when no such thing was actually happening. The show is The Chosen, which generated plenty of (earned) media […]
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Double-feature review: ‘The Northman’ and ‘Saturday Fiction’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Back in 1996, writers Andrew Strader and Nick Nicholas took a mildly funny running gag from Star Trek VI to the final frontier of nerdom by translating all of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into Klingon. Because wouldn’t it be hilariously incongruous if the warlike baddies from the original series (sorry, Worf) were also super invested in the […]
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‘Tony Hawk: Until The Wheels Fall Off’: Impossible to dislike
Reading Time: 3 minutes Some subjects lend themselves better to film. A skateboarder spinning 900 degrees in the air and crashing into a half-pipe is one of those subjects. It’s hard to describe to someone how pervasive Tony Hawk was in American culture for almost a decade. He brought an entire generation of kids into skateboarding. His Pro Skater […]
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‘The Chair’ on Netflix: Thoughts from a disenchanted academic
Reading Time: 3 minutes I am what you might call a “disenchanted academic.” I went straight from high school to undergrad to grad school, and finished my PhD in 2012. I only found job stability a few months ago, and it’s as a lecturer at a wonderful liberal arts college, not as the tenured professor I’d dreamed of becoming. […]
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Now this I gotta see: a bare-chested Mark Wahlberg getting baptized in a Catholic church
Reading Time: 3 minutes I’ve always been a fan Mark Wahlberg, formerly Marky Mark, and I think he’s one of the sexiest men on the planet. There, I’ve said it, and I won’t apologize. So maybe soon I’ll put myself through the ordeal of sitting through a two-hour long faith-based movie, Father Stu, just to see him topless in […]
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Michael Bay excess finds worthy outlet in ‘Ambulance’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Following the Sam Raimi retrospective on the Blank Check podcast (they recently covered Army of Darkness) offers a renewed appreciation for Raimi’s madcap ingenuity. Film nerd legend has it that The Evil Dead lacked the funds for a camera dolly, so Raimi and crew constructed a wooden platform to slide a camera down that would […]
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‘Cow,’ ‘Gunda,’ and the strangeness of the mundane
Reading Time: 2 minutes The first movie I watched theatrically in 2021, following roughly a year of streaming and semi-deranged DVD hoarding, was Viktor Kossakovsky’s livestock documentary Gunda. Shot in crisp black and white, Gunda wordlessly follows the titular sow and her piglets on a pleasant-looking Norwegian farm. There’s no human dialogue or narration to orient the viewer, no […]