Unemployed Negativity

E.T. The Extraterrestrial  Can set design make or break a film? In general, probably not, but it made one film for me. I remember seeing E.T...

  Marx wrote, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living," but he neglected to add...

  2025 will probably go down in history as a pivotal year in the US's decline into a particular kind of media driven twenty-first centur...

  As someone who teaches philosophy at a regional public university, which is to say a school without a lot of students who could ever imagi...

  I once heard someone remark about Alien that during the Reagan era the capitalist hegemony against workers was so complete that the only w...

  The recent Planet of the Apes films can be defined by two questions: one internal to the films themselves, to their own universe, albeit w...

Seeing Nope at the Bridgton Twin Drive In  Movie critics, even amateur ones, love puns, love working the title into their reviews in some so...

A similar image of dinosaurs in the snow circulated at about the same time from two very different sources. The first, above, was from Prehi...

  I was slow to get to Severance. Partly this has to do with conditions of contemporary cultural consumption. The shift from movies to telev...

  The Matrix is a film about work. Long before Neo escapes the matrix he has to break out of a much more mundane space of confinement, the o...

  More than once I have made the joke that if philosophy really wanted to go back to its Platonic (or Socratic roots) then it most recognizi...

All panels and art from Tim Truman Scout, Eclipse comics During the odd grifter's interregnum of the last few weeks a particular image c...

Monster come in cycles. Werewolves wax and wane in and out of cultural visibility, and even vampires disappear and return.   There migh...

There is no film this year that I have anticipated more than Sorry to Bother You. I have been a fan of Boots Riley since I first learned...

As a kid I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I know that there is nothing unique about this and that is precisely why I relate it. My obsess...

Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape of Water  is an odd and improbable creature, a monster movie that is a critical darling. The critica...

Matt Damon has the odd distinction of staring in two science fiction dystopias, one bleak action movie the other farce, that are absolu...

I think that I may have grown up watching Blade Runner. I do not mean that I watched the film several times growing up, although that is...

Perhaps the new ape films should be considered as one long remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes . Initially, this seemed to be l...

I am not sure if this going to be much more than a long exhortation to watch The Expanse.