The Global Village
In college, I wrote a couple of research papers that separately, examined a future in which the average person would be a content creator in his or her own right. More than ten years later, society appears to be on the edge of a technological convergence that will truly make it a reality. I haven’t written film criticism in a couple of years, and I don’t intend…
What I find interesting about movies, other than the fact that 85 percent of them are crap, is that many directors seem to think they still need to sell the film with a flashy title sequence in the first 60 seconds after people have already hired a babysitter, bought tickets, spent $97 at the concession stand, and sat through twenty minutes of theatrical trailers. If Michael Mann ever…
There is a fine line between love of cinema, and pseudointellectual masturbation. “Clerks II” is certainly not the first film to walk the tightrope between the two… but it may very well be one of the few in which doing so lends purpose to the narrative. I didn’t think about it until after the movie was over, because one has to see where it goes to appreciate that, intentionally or not, it…
The glassy twinges of the soundtrack as the movie begins set a scatterbrain tone that gives one a frame of reference for Bob Arctor’s (Keanu Reeves) frame(s) of mind. Like some of his friends, Bob is addicted to Substance D—a refined narcotic that seven years from now is blamed for nearly all of society’s ills, of which the exact nature of the manufacture and…



