Feb 7, 2011 2
In “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons,” the Community study group treats D&D like a legitimate social event rather than a sideshow. But this show being this show, the event is couched in various layers of irony that ultimately will make the episode more remembered for its riff on quest narratives than as the one in which Fat Neil regains his self-esteem and finds a reason to live.
Jan 31, 2011 3
Pierce Hawthorne’s nominal allusion to the writer Nathaniel seems calculated as an ironic comment on his own rank immorality in the form of an anti-minority bias worn with shimmering scarlet pride. But Pierce’s racism is one unsavory aspect of his hopeful way of being human: inveterately deploying an insult and awaiting the closeness it will inevitably bring him with the insulted. Pierce’s racism is a racism of love.
Jan 31, 2011 0
No one believes that this is my favorite movie, but not because I am male. This can’t be anybody’s favorite movie—it’s an airy romantic comedy, one of the latest in a menagerie of ’90s Clueless rip-offs, right? I mean come on, there’s a “what-happens-to-the-characters-after-graduation” dénouement with everyone slo-mo flinging their caps up in triumph. Plus, the sequels [...]
Jan 31, 2011 0
With the release of Sid and Nancy in 1986, filmmaker Alex Cox was the toast of the indie film community. So he decided to take $6 million from Universal and make the most bizarre biopic ever: Walker, an acid western starring Ed Harris as William Walker, an American filibuster who colonialized and ruled Nicaragua for [...]
Jan 24, 2011 1
Alfred Chester fits into the American literary-critical narrative nowhere. Chester, born in 1928 and dead of drugs and depression 43 years later, was a radical, queer, Jewish, liberal writer of fiction (Head of a Sad Angel), criticism and theory (Looking for Genet) who made no effort to hide his various minority identities, making them central [...]
