My Neighbor Totoro, by Hayao Miyazaki My Neighbor Totoro (1988) is a quiet, calm, beautiful film. There is no dialogue for very long stretches of story while characters explore, watch, and discover—akin to the opening sequence of WALL-e. There is no sass talk, there are no quick cuts, no pop-culture references, and no special effects. Nothing explodes. The movie is rated G. It is a hand-drawn animated film made a quarter-century ago. I watched it together with my two children,... Read more
Review of Republocrat: Confessions of a Liberal Conservative by Carl Trueman Imagine that an evangelical Brit decides to make running commentary on American politics–what would he say? Add to that the fact that this particular Brit has lived in the United States for almost two decades; then add the dash of cheekiness that we have come to expect of such fellows from across the pond. That’s what we get from Carl Trueman in Republocrat–a book that has something in it... Read more
Review of George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis Magisterial, thousand-page, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies are usually reserved for presidents, emperors, generals, and saints. With John Lewis Gaddis’ definitive George F. Kennan: An American Life, the epic treatment is given to a 20th Century American bureaucrat. Who was George Kennan, and why does he deserve an exhaustive work by a renowned historian? Kennan was the intellectual father of “containment,” the strategy of applying “counterforce” to the Soviet Union’s... Read more
Review of At Any Price, Directed by Ramin Bahrani Profoundly American and profoundly disturbing, At Any Price, the newest release by acclaimed director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo, Chop Shop), strikes at the heart of our enterprise and reveals the broken souls drifting along this cycle of greed. The Whipple family is steeped in Iowa’s agriculture business, which must “expand or die.” In one sense, the Whipples and their neighboring farmers are required to play this game of economies of scale,... Read more
Review of Iron Man 3, Directed by Shane Black Does this movie even really need a review? As with everything else in the Avengers oeuvre to date (with the possible exceptions of Hulk and The Incredible Hulk), Iron Man 3 is a lot of action-y goodness with light moral thematic underpinnings. Which is exactly what we want from a comic book movie. Those that over-moralize at the expense of action inevitably fail, as do those that cut the moral out completely... Read more
Review of Kon-Tiki, Directed by Joachim Roenning and Espen Sandberg Kon-Tiki is a name that has faded from popular memory, but launched a generation of explorers and adventurers, including astronauts. Kon-Tiki is the name of a raft that carried a crew of five Norwegians, a Swede, and a parrot named Lorita, all the way from Peru to the Polynesian islands. The point of the journey? To prove that people from the east (that is South Americans), not the west (that... Read more
At Any Price tells the fictional, but oh so real story of the Whipple family, caught up in the Darwinian struggle to survive in the modern agriculture business, which thrives under the banner “expand or die”. We watch as this attitude of never having enough seeps from the corporate level down to the individual lives of farmers and their children. My review of this film will come out tomorrow. In the meantime, we thought our readers would enjoy a special... Read more
Review of The General, Directed by Buster Keaton In our effort to blog our way through the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Films, I picked out one of the few movies on the list I had not only not seen, but never even heard of: The General (1927). For some reason I expected a somber silent drama about some military officer’s dreary, tragic life. I think the one-word nondescript title sounds drab and pretentious, so I assumed the movie would... Read more
Review of Last Train Home, Directed by Lixin Fan The documentary Last Train Home tells the heart-wrenching story of a family caught in the turbulence of an industrializing China. Every Spring, for Chinese New Year, 130 million migrant workers trek back to their rural homes to rejoin their families, only to return again to their urban employment. The film was released in 2009 and now, four years later, the story is still relevant. Zhang Changhua (father) and Chen Suqin (mother)... Read more
Review of Wreck-It Ralph, Directed by Rich Moore Confession: I love video games. When I was 2, my dad bought the Apple II computer. Some of my earliest memories are playing stone-age video games together as a family. I remember playing Cranston Manor. This was a game only slightly more sophisticated than Pong. It was a mystery game. A still image was on the screen, painted in plain 8-bit color graphics. Two lines of text described the scene. “You are... Read more
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