All That Jas
Aug19

All That Jas

In Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois is an alcoholic, a woman of privilege who’s fallen from grace and refuses to let go of her former lifestyle, who has to shift down a class and as a result has a nervous breakdown. She staves off the nervous breakdown for a spell by staying with her much-lower-down-on-the-economic-food-chain sister Stella, who is married to the thuggish, animalistic (but at least real, and...

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Retrospective Review: (100) Minutes of Dishonesty
Aug16

Retrospective Review: (100) Minutes of Dishonesty

I can get around the basic complaints that my good-taste friends have of Summer. I can get around, for instance, its annoying too-hip-ness, with its Regina-Spektor-Wolfmother-Smiths-She-and-Him soundtrack, its casting of Zooey Deschanel as the titular Summer, and its parentheses around the number “500” in the title (why?). I’m not a very aesthetic filmgoer anyway, and as long as the story interests me, I can overlook whatever costume...

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#tbt: Five Lessons Grosse Pointe Blank Will Teach You About Attending Your Ten Year Reunion
Aug15

#tbt: Five Lessons Grosse Pointe Blank Will Teach You About Attending Your Ten Year Reunion

Tony Soprano was a professional killer, but he was also just a man with anxiety issues, and who dealt with said issues by visiting weekly with a therapist. Since Tony was a mobster first and a person second, the therapy sessions on The Sopranos were just a device—what we really wanted was to see the inner-workings of a killer, so having him, say, write in a diary would have been just as effective. Conversely, Martin Blank is a man...

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What Happens When People Stop Being Polite
Aug05

What Happens When People Stop Being Polite

  During the Trayvon Martin trial, one of the (many) points of debate brought up by the American public, if not by the attorneys themselves, was who exactly Trayvon Martin was. Conservatives argued that he was a large and intimidating presence, 6’2”, 175 lbs., covered in tattoos, a thug who spent his free time flipping off his webcam. Liberals countered that in fact Trayvon Martin was a skinny kid, 158 lbs., 5’11”, a child who...

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To Be Clear: In Praise of Reza Aslan
Jul30

To Be Clear: In Praise of Reza Aslan

  “Ma’am, you may not have heard of me,” Reza Aslan told Fox News reporter Lauren Green on the internet show Spirited Debate, “but I’m actually a fairly prominent Muslim thinker in the United States.” Well, that’s an understatement. Aslan is not only a “fairly prominent” Muslim thinker but arguably the most widely- and well-respected religious scholar we have. Thinker being the operative word, because Aslan is neither a...

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