Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Real,
Traditional, Marriage (Big Love, 2/1/10) The HBO series Big
Love is not for everybody. In a time when mere gay marriage—that
is, between just two people—qualifies as a white hot issue, asking
an audience to sympathize with a family of fundamentalist Mormon (FLDS)
polygamists in suburban Salt Lake City takes a certain amount of faith.
The gamble seems to be paying off so far: the series began its fourth
season last month...
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Descent
of a Frequent Flyer (Up in the Air, 1/18/09) Here's a proposition
for you: in exchange for a salary, I want you to devote at least half
your waking life—eight to ten hours a day—to making me rich.
I want you to devote your time and energy to the tasks I assign to you,
at the expense of your family and social life. I'm going involve you
in nerve-wracking competitive evaluations with your peers, after which
I might reward you for good performance—or I might not. You may
get some health insurance, but I get to dictate the terms. A pension?
Forget it. In exchange for the absolute loyalty I demand, I reserve
the right to dump you from my payroll anytime I see fit...
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Not
Your Father's Apocalypse (The Road, 12/21/09) Is it time
for the world to end—again? John Hillcoat's The Road has
a lot of company in envisioning the end of days. On the other side of
the multiplex wall, there's the Mayan-inspired apocalypse of 2012
(mark your calendars, folks); the previews before The Road promise
no less than two world-ending visions, The Book of Eli and The
Crazies to add to the list of Terminators and Matrices
and zombie epidemics and planet-killing asteroids that already seem
to have destroyed us many times over...
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About
A Girl (An Education, 11/23/09) If there's a better British
example of a career-making role than that given to young Carey
Mulligan in An Education, you'd probably have to go back to Alfie
in
1966, which made a star out of a Cockney bloke named Michael Caine...
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The
Thing That Wouldn't Leave (Paranormal Activity, 11/2/09)
How
creepy is Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity? Full disclosure: while
I
refused to sleep with the lights on after a late-night showing, I did
turn on the lava lamp in my bedroom. And I cursed my corgi for her
heavy, inhuman snoring...
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