“Dancer in the Dark”
24 February 2001
Tonight I saw the most painful movie I’ve ever seen, in fact the only painful movie I’ve seen in my life. I was fidgeting and squirming, covering my eyes, shaking, and moaning during this horrible thing. A half dozen people left the theater during some of the worst parts. My wife nearly vomited. I still feel ill hours later.
There was nothing gruesome or frightening in “Dancer in the Dark.” It’s not a horror flick.
Deliberation Day
March 12, 2004
“Deliberation Day” is the title of a new book by Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin. Ackerman was also the coauthor of The Stakeholder Society – a brilliant book proposing that we provide every young American with $80,000 through a 2 percent tax on wealth above $80,000, in order to give everyone the opportunity to acquire an education or launch a business. In Deliberation Day, Ackerman has produced an even more interesting idea, an even more exciting
“Sexual Personae,” By Camille Paglia.
Camille Paglia’s SEXUAL PERSONAE is a huge book in every sense. It makes me want to read and reread a great many books, examine and re-examine a great number of sculptures and paintings. There are in it interpretations of particular works with which I disagree, and others on which I am not qualified to judge, but the big themes in it – the continuity of paganism, the approaches to sex and nature – are a valuable contribution.
One
Freeing Our Press
Sep. 6, 2004
A review of “Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism,” edited and with an introduction by Robert W. McChesney and Ben Scott, published in 2004 by The New Press, 435 pages.
This book collects some stunning examples of U.S. media criticism from 1906 through 2003. The introduction is in many ways a wonderful work of analysis. The primary purpose it lays out for the book is establishing that radical criticism of for-profit media is not new or
Nursing Against the Odds: The Workers’ View
March 12, 2005
“Nursing Against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, and Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care,” by Suzanne Gordon, Cornell University Press, 450 pages.
Nurses. Nurses. Nurses. Already I’ve guaranteed that more people will find this article on the internet who are searching for pornography than who are searching for answers to our health care crisis or insights into one of the most
Moore and More is Needed
June 29, 2004
Also published at http://www.opednews.com and http://www.democraticunderground.com and http://www.michaelmoore.com
Fahrenheit 9-11 reminds me of Howard Dean. Both were wildly promoted by the media in a manner not carefully thought through by media bigwigs, and then both were savaged by the media just before opening day.
The size of the audiences seeing this movie was guaranteed by the media hype, and the notion that the audiences consist mainly of liberal activists
Silver City Smokes
August 14, 2004
Mark your calendar now and plan to go see John Sayles’ new movie “Silver City” when it opens on Friday, September 17. It’s a powerfully entertaining story and – more importantly for any good book or movie this year – it’s powerfully anti-Bush.
Someone told me “Manchurian Candidate” was an anti-Bush movie. I didn’t think so when I saw it, not even in the way that “The Day After Tomorrow” was
