January 2012

Whole lotta lyin’ goin’ on

January 31, 2012

So I guess Mitt Romney will finally manage to win one in Florida. But he’s had to do it the hard way: With several million dollars worth of ads comparing Newt Gingrich unfavorably to Lord Voldemort. Gingrich has been doing the same thing to Romney, of course, but then had the misfortune to appear mildly [...]

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Going downhill at Downton Abbey

January 29, 2012

I‘m still enjoying Downton Abbey, but four episodes into Season 2 it’s beginning to seem kind of contrived. Where the first season focused mainly on interesting characters coping with the class strictures of pre-war England, this season is devolving into plot-based melodrama. Exhibit A: This ridiculous business of Bates’ vengeful ex-wife Vera, who started out [...]

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Who’s ready for some pinkeye?

January 28, 2012

It’s been an interesting week. We have a Cuban couple staying at our house and we’ve been doing our best to surmount the language barrier. In addition, I’ve had to contemplate the loss of vision in my right eye. The two things aren’t related, of course. The Cuban couple, Jose Angel and Lucrecia, we met [...]

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A little too much magic

January 27, 2012

Sometimes you watch movies by yourself because you don’t want anyone else to know you’re watching these movies. I don’t mean porn. I’m talking about Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. I recently reactivated the old Netflix DVD queue and for some reason stuck Part 1 on there, along with a few other recent titles [...]

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This is rich

January 26, 2012

Newt Gingrich appears to be worth at least $7 million. Mitt Romney is worth around $150 million. My question is this: If both men are millionaires many times over, does the poorer one get to call the richer one “elitist”? That’s the mood here in north Florida, apparently. CNN has this story about how Gingrich, [...]

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If you only see one silent film this year …

January 25, 2012

Expanding on yesterday’s post, we did go and see The Artist. Two thumbs up. While it’s hard to judge whether the movie’s appeal derives more from the gimmick ( a silent film in black and white) or the story (the inevitable arc of celebrity in Hollywood), maybe it’s best not to overthink it. What I [...]

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Limit the Oscar nominees to those I’ve seen

January 24, 2012

Of this year’s Oscar nominees, so far I’ve seen three: The Descendants, Moneyball and War Horse. Tonight, the wife and I may go see The Artist. Maybe we’ll get to some of the others too, but really: the nominees are no longer must-see cinema, are they? Were they ever? We just go for the same [...]

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Would you mind shutting the hell up?

January 23, 2012

Don’t you hate asking people behind you in a theater to keep quiet? I do. I always fret that it might escalate into something undignified, like a fistfight in the parking lot. Sometimes appeals to common courtesy hit people the wrong way. It’s like you flipped them the bird or keyed their Camaro. But I [...]

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Sorry, Joe. We thought you were dead

January 22, 2012

I was glad to see those greatly exaggerated reports of Joe Paterno’s death. Not because I had any ill will toward Paterno, but because I like seeing this gilded sparrow we call Twitter sometimes crash into a brick wall. And I like the fleeting embarrassment of the Twitterati while the little feathers fall gently to [...]

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Obama, Al Green and the fat man

January 21, 2012

So we’ve got the president channeling Al Green and Newt Gingrich looking like he can win in South Carolina. Two guys defying my cynical and uninformed expectations. There is a reason I don’t get paid to analyze politics. How about that Obama? This is going to make the Tea Party types hate him all the [...]

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