What are you boys fighting for? That’s the question writer-historian Shelby Foote tries to answer in Ken Burns’ landmark 1990 documentary The Civil War. Foote finds it in the story of a Union soldier encountering a beleaguered Confederate rebel, a … Continue reading CIVIL WAR
It’s not about race; it’s about caste—the system of injustice and subjugation that persists, generation from generation, resistant to the individuals who work to defy and shatter it. So it is in Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction study, Caste: The Origins … Continue reading ORIGIN
There is one idea nestled inside Dumb Money that’s worth a damn: Community. Or, as the movie (possibly unintentionally) illustrates, what passes for community in the absence of one. Based on the nonfiction book The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich, Dumb Money rehashes the real-life stock … Continue reading DUMB MONEY
Most Hollywood movies can be neatly summed up and packaged in one 140-character sentence. The official term for it is “High Concept.” To try to sum up The Lego Movie in a single sentence or label it high concept is nearly impossible, … Continue reading THE LEGO MOVIE
Kate Hannah (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is a typical kind of person. She has a sordid past that she would prefer not to think about, a present that she isn’t fond of, and a future as hazy as a Sunday morning … Continue reading SMASHED
Michael J. Cinema 