Friday, December 25, 2020

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...

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

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...

Friday, December 11, 2020

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...

Saturday, December 5, 2020

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....