The Muppets Christmas Carol

Ebenezer Scrooge does not care for the so-called "surplus population". He's actually quite clear about it. In Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge is petitioned by two do-gooders trying to help the poor, he barks at them that "if [the poor] would rather die [than go to poor...

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The Prom

The new musical The Prom is kind of like the Pete Buttigieg of musicals, which is too harsh to Buttigieg, whom I generally like (and preferred over the eventual nominee), but I get why a lot of people don't care for him. I'm not the first one who has thought of similarities between Buttigeg and The...

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Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone

"Your sins are terrible, and it is just that you suffer."Francis Ford Coppola always considered The Godfather Part III, the third feature in his trilogy based on Mario Puzo's famous novel, now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, to be an epilogue. Hence the "coda", which is apparently what Coppola...

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Mank

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."-Upton SinclairMank, the first film directed by David Fincher since Gone Girl six years ago, is, as you may suspect, a Hollywood film dripping with Hollywood nostalgia for the 1930s and 1940s....

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The Witches

"Witches are women who have subsumed their anger, right?" That's a question Angelica Huston asked her interviewer a few years ago to promote a new film she was starring in. Much of the conversation, it seems, centered on Huston's thoughts on micro-aggressions toward women and the anger that...

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Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Fourteen years after Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Sacha Baron Cohen as the Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev is back in a surprise film made in secret over the year. There had been hints that Cohen was up to something throughout the past few months, but now we have our answer in this biting satire. For the past decade-plus, Cohen has mostly shifted...

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A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote

In my mind, A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote (aka the West Wing Reunion) is not the West Wing reunion we wanted or needed. Why? Because everything is so different now that the universe of The West Wing seems way too fantastical. So much time has passed since the show went off the...

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Mulan

"But when the two rabbits run side by side,  How can you tell the female from the male?" -"Ballad of Mulan" "The emperor walked into the most obvious trap in fake chinese history and then started doing bed sheet kung fu (sic)." That is how Chinese writer Xiran Jay Zhao, the author of...

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Miss Juneteenth

In the opening moments of Miss Juneteenth, the debut feature film of writer and director Channing Godfrey Peoples, a woman is looking through her old dress from a pageant. Accompanying this scene is "Lift Every Voice and Sing", the song often referred to as the "Black national anthem" and written by...

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Get Me Roger Stone

As expected, Donald Trump has just commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, his longtime friend and political advisor. Apparently, according to the White House, children and teachers can risk their lives going to school during a pandemic, but prison is too medically risky for Mr. Stone, who was convicted on seven counts this year, including witness tampering and lying to investigators. He was sentenced...

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Hamilton

2020 has not been the kindest year to the United States of America. As everyone knows, the country leads in COVID-19 cases and deaths, which as of this writing are at 2.8 million and 132,000, respectively. The ensuing recession has been like none before it, with unemployment reaching at least fifteen...

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Da 5 Bloods

Five years ago, the New York Times reported on how reconciliation might truly be taking place in Vietnam, as Vietnamese veterans of the "American War" sat and joined their former enemies (U.S. veterans) while eating chili and chicken wings to celebrate the Fourth of July. Almost 90 percent of young Vietnamese (at least as of 2015) have a favorable opinion of the United States, with many studying in...

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