Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of Ruskies?  The Shadow Recruit knows! Reactionary espionage novelist Tom Clancy may have died last year, but his heroic CIA agent, Jack Ryan, lives on, as does the rightwing pro-CIA Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Entertainment Complex’s agitprop.  To be sure, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Paramount’s reboot of the Clancy-derived, highly lucrative Ryan film franchise, is a slickly made, entertaining piece Continue Reading...

November 22, 2013 is the 50th anniversary of what is arguably the greatest unsolved murder in American history, the 1963 shooting of President Kennedy.  Conventional thinkers, hacks and propagandists may seek to perpetrate and perpetuate lone gunman, magic bullet and other cover-ups about assassinations and the like -- but the big screen knows better!  Behind-the-scenes conspiracies shrouded in mystery and carried out by government elites, rogue Continue Reading...

About Time is a romantic comedy about time travel that, appropriately, hails from the land that gave birth to H.G. Wells, author of this genre’s trendsetting 1895 sci fi classic The Time Machine.  However, in the Britain-set About Time time travel is not like Rod Serling’s 1958 pilot for The Twilight Zone, wherein William Bendix goes back in time to Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and frantically tries to warn everybody about the impending Imperial Continue Reading...

Beholding Cirque du Soleil’s spectacle of the senses I had the sensation Dorothy had when, after being tornado-tossed from the black and white Midwest skyward, she crash lands and glimpsing the Technicolor land of Oz, gasps and says to her dog: “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.” Continue Reading...

Miley is guiltless.  She’s just a cog in the machine.  Women have no choice but to play the cultural role in which they are ordained.  It’s our myopic patriarchy that’s wrong here.  Miley has all the talent to make it without twerking and otherwise acting like an peripatetic inflatable sex doll. Nothing to be done. Continue Reading...