A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Movies

  • Batman: The Dark Knight trailer

    I was a bit skeptical of Heath Ledger as the Joker, but this looks pretty awesome: (Replacing the boring Katie Holmes with the divine Maggie Gyllenhaal wasn’t a bad idea either.) Read more

  • Confession

    I really want to see National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to convince anyone I know to go with me. Why do all my friends have to have such good taste in movies? Read more

  • The right profile

    I heartily recomment the new documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten. I saw it yesterday afternoon and loved it. The live footage of the Clash is electrifying and worth the price of admission alone. But even if you’re not a big Clash fan (and if not, well, what’s wrong with you?), the movie is Read more

  • Abortion on film

    Interesting review of the new abortion documentary Lake of Fire in this article (scroll down). I can’t say that it exactly makes me want to see the movie, but the idea of attempting to make a movie on abortion that treats both sides fairly is certainly a laudable one (link via Ross Douthat). Read more

  • Pacifism and just war in The Mission

    Last night I re-watched The Mission, one of my all-time favorite movies (with screenplay written by Robert Bolt, who also wrote the screenplay of one of my other all-time faves, A Man For All Seasons). Like A Man for All Seasons, The Mission is about conscience and the way we respond to injustice. The Mission Read more

  • Children of Men

    Warning: spoilers ahoy! When I first read P.D. James’s Children of Men back in January I wondered how in the world they’d managed to make a Hollywood movie out of it. After all, here’s a book where the heroes are a band of Christian terrorists, the villain is an overweening government that subsidizes euthanasia, and Read more

  • Random weekend culture notes

    On Friday we went with some friends to see The Decemberists at the Avalon, a club near Fenway park. Fantastic! The theatricality of their music comes out even more on stage. I’m not generally a fan of “indie rock” as a genre (not sure the Decemberists even fit into that category), but these guys are Read more