WE THE PEOPLE ARE STILL AROUND: Gun Grabs: Virginia, Idaho Ground Zero in Fight Against Left.
Archive for 2019
December 26, 2019
WELL, DIE HARD IS MY FAVORITE CHRISTMAS MOVIE: The overwhelming conservativism of two non-religious Christmas classics.
I HAD NO IDEA HUNTER WAS SO INDUSTRIOUS. HIS DAD MUST BE VERY PROUD OF HIM: Hunter Biden subject of multiple ‘criminal investigations’.
TV VIEWING WARPS OUR PERCEPTIONS? UN-POSSIBLE: Watching TV makes men more attracted to skinny women, scientists claim.
THE INTERNET DIVIDED INTO TWO CAMPS: THOSE WHO COULD CARE LESS, AND THOSE WHO COULDN’T: Kim Kardashian’s ‘creamy velvet’ wrapping paper divides the internet.
THE ARTICLE IS REMARKABLY LACKING IN EXPLANATION OF HOW THEY DISCOVERED THIS; SEEMS THAT MIGHT BE RELEVANT: Iron ‘snow’ could be falling in Earth’s core, study shows.
I’M SURE THIS WILL SOLVE ALL THE CITY’S PROBLEMS WITH UNWANTED WASTE! San Francisco cafes are banning disposable coffee cups.
IT’S THE MOST “WONDERFUL” TIME OF THE YEAR: As lawyers brace for a surge in divorce cases in January, new research highlights the financial benefits of splitting up.
Meh. I’ll keep my husband, thanks.
THIS SEEMS WORTH A LOOK: A decade on earth captured from space,
December 25, 2019
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
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Plus, deals on Digital Music.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
WHO ARE THEY KIDDING? THIS IS A LARRY CORREIA NOVEL. Louisiana Church Filled A Plane With Holy Water And Blessed A Whole Community. Hope the demonic incursion was stopped.
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MERRY CHRISTMAS!
MERRY CHRISTMAS:
Okay, it’s a departure from today’s theme, but what the hell, it’s funny. From LawSuitGuitars in this thread.
OPEN THREAD: Hang your shining star upon the highest bough.
MERRY CHRISTMAS:
https://youtu.be/9L5mPfpeXxk
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
LEFTIST JOURNOS ARE SO PETTY: CBC Cuts Donald Trump’s Home Alone 2 Cameo Out of Broadcast.
THEODORE DALRYMPLE: A Matter of Truth: On Ricky Gervais, J. K. Rowling, and speaking frankly.
KYLE SMITH: Sam Mendes’ 1917: A Somber Journey into Hell.
That movie, the Peter Jackson documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, was meticulously, devastatingly real. 1917, by contrast, starts out convincing but comes to seem unforgivably contrived around the halfway mark, and by the end it asks us to suspend disbelief to such a degree that the effect is nearly absurd. I was reminded of Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, whose protagonist developed into a kind of Buster Keaton figure who miraculously bumbled his way through a storm of violence so focused that it seemed as if the Wehrmacht’s sole purpose was to kill this random citizen.
1917 is defined also by its surface contrivance: Sam Mendes has designed the film as a single take (followed, after a brief blackout in the second half, by another single take). Like Birdman, though, as well as the fantastically complicated opening scene of Mendes’s own James Bond film Spectre, 1917is actually composed of many shots ingeniously woven together using digital wizardry to look like a single take. I dislike the gimmick, at least at this length; staying on a single take creates a sense of hanging in midair as we wonder when we’ll finally hit the ground, and it works beautifully for a single scene like the opening of Spectre or Touch of Evil (1958), the Orson Welles film that inspired all subsequent one-take sorcery. Keeping a take going for an entire movie, though, is a mistake. It redirects the attention from the story to the technique. To be slightly rude about it, it makes Sam Mendes, not his characters, the star of the movie.
Read the whole thing, which is spoiler-free. Having just returned from a sold-out showing, I can vouch that it’s an intense ride, but it lacks the emotional catharsis that concludes Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 directorial breakthrough Paths of Glory, still the best fictional movie set in WWI, or Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, both films that 1917 takes its visual cues and story arc from. But if you’re interested in the topic and/or the simulated single-take directorial style (something Alfred Hitchcock attempted on a much smaller scale, but without today’s digital ability to stitch shots together in his underrated 1948 drawing room murder mystery Rope), it’s definitely worth seeing on the big screen.