Peter Sellers was a very funny person, but he was also deeply disturbed and, this movie suggests, refused to become a responsible adult all through his life. This movie is often hilarious, incredibly well acted, especially on the part of Geoffrey Rush, who is as amazing and chameleonlike as Sellers himself used to be, but […]
The caveat first: this is not exactly a book written for a general audience. It is a treatise of ethical philosophy, and the reasoning and phrasing is, I felt, even denses in some places than reverence to the esteemed traditions of academic discourse, let alone the subject matter, should have had it be (Though not […]
Most of what this movie reveals about the criminal mastermind Kissinger was already known to me, and while the detached way the material was presented made the movie seem much more objective and unassailable as any movie ever could be, it also produced a feeling of heavy handed redundancy. I think if my choices are […]
As usual with obscure stuff on our Netflix list, I forget where I came across this or why I ordered it. A quick IMDB and google search reveals that Argento, and this movie in particular, have a devoted fanbase who consider him a visual genius and Suspiria the paragon of horror movies. I beg to […]
I was unable to find any image of the cover of this book online – which tells you something about it’s age. The Social Brain came out in the 80s, and it proposed, based in Gazzaniga’s own groundbreaking research on split brain patients, that the brain was a combined structure of separate and somewhat independent […]
This is a profoundly silly book, about magic symbols and masonic references on the US 1$ bill. Some of them are surprising and interesting (like the etymology of Dollar, the significance of the pyramid, or the source for the $ symbol), but most of the letter and word counting and geometric analysis of what appears […]
I have wanted to see this ever since I saw the trailers on HBO when it first came out, firstly because the subject seemed interesting (the invention of heart surgery combined with the story of racial discrimination in the medical establishment), and because Alan Rickman plays one of the main characters. Those were good enough […]
I have to admit to being reluctant to go see this, mainly because I thought it would, beyond the taboo breaking gimmick which seemed to have catapulted the two cowboys into the center of the cultural universe, be an inconsequential and boring love story. Now I feel reluctant to point out how wrong I was, […]
In this sequel to Hyperion, we learn a lot more about what the Shrike is, who built the Time Tombs and why, and what the enigmatic events in the first book meant. In a way, these revelations destroy the sense of mystery that surrounded the time tombs and the Shrike. The necessity to keep a […]
This could have been a marvelous homage to martial arts movies in general and the Zatoichi series in particular, full of references to details of Japanese culture, and funny little scenes. But unfortunately the plot, which should have been a simple story of evil oppression and the lone swordsman who breaks it, is told in […]