newcritics

Zion, oh mighty Zion, your bison now are dust
As your cornflakes rise ‘gainst the rust-red skies,
then our blood requires we go…
Marching, marching to Shibboleth
On a recent car trip with my high-school-age son, just for fun, I popped into the CD player, Firesign Theatre’s Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers.
“What is [...]

I used to love war movies. In part, because they were so darned…reliable.
Serve up a viewing of Bridge Over The River Kwai or The Dirty Dozen, and you could rely on a heapin’ helping of gunfire with the bare minimum of chit-chat. You could rely on knowing – I mean really [...]

Good movies are rarely made from great books.
There are the rare exceptions (think of Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Brides and Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita) that succeed mainly by trying to be something quite different from the books on which they’re based.
For the most part, however, filmmakers are content to abridge and abbreviate, [...]