All You Need to Know in Four Easy Steps With the possible exception of beer, there is no more populist potable than wine. In France, Italy, and Spain, it’s on every dinner table, as common an accoutrement as the salt and pepper shakers. Europeans imbibe wine for lunch, dinner, and…

Kevin Costner may not have foreseen his film’s failure at the box office, but he eerily forecast the state of the union in the Age of Trump. Matt Bors, the editor and publisher of The Nib, had an interesting observation on Twitter: In The Postman (1997) the US has collapsed…

Joel Schumacher looked at the Sixties Batman series and said “You call that camp? Hold my beer…” Batman & Robin (1997) Directed by Joel Schumacher Written by Akiva Goldsman Our movie begins with rapid cuts of polyurethane codpieces and bun-hugging rubber bondage pants with built-in butt cracks. This sequence represents…

It’s time to bring back the movies’ deadliest and fakest martial art. The 1980s were a manly time for motion pictures; an age when movies about muscular men with speech impediments signaled an end to the agonizing introspection of the Post-Vietnam era. In the oeuvre of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, we…

The California Governor Who Wrote Trump’s Pandemic Playbook President Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic may seem like the most tone deaf, myopic public health policy since Prince Prospero locked himself and a thousand of his richest friends in his abbey and tried to party through the plague. But only…

Let us meditate upon these truths at the fifth level. Zardoz (1974) Directed by John Boorman Written by John Boorman Now that we know who to blame, let’s start the movie. Our story opens with the disembodied head of a fey Englishman, who’s sporting facial hair scribbled on with an…

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Rather than getting drunk, the traditional American method of honoring the founder of Christianity in Ireland, let’s put down the bottle, pick up the remote, and watch a crappy movie. At least then you’ll have a reason to get drunk. Leprechaun (1993) Written and Directed by…

Two young Mexican brothers walked into his gym and refused to leave until he made them champions. So he did. Many sports (outside of such whispered-commentary spectacles as golf or snooker) have a frankly atavistic appeal, and the potential to reduce their spectators to hooting mobs held in check solely…