On 'Crash': The Most Loathsome Best Picture Of Them All
And yet strangely, Haggis' next film was 'In The Valley of Elah' and it was everything 'Crash' was not. Elliptical, ambiguous and very genuinely sad...which is probably why no one saw it.
I blame Scientology.
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On Republican Party Will Soon Be Four Rich Guys In A Room
@deepomega Rubio will never fly with Latinos at large. He's a white right-wing Cuban. This is where the Republicans are making another grave misstep. They read Latinos as a homogenous group, rather than realizing there are grave class and race divisions in Latino politics as well.
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On Viral Culture… Before The Internet
Had a 27th generation cassette dub of this for years...immortalized in the Negativeland song U2 (which also got them famously sued by the eponymous band), Casey Kasem losing his shit in the studio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV7WF5VVwuo
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On The Most Flagrantly Tactless First-Rate Brooklyn Novelist
I grew up with LJ's younger son, and one of his daughters was one of my preschool playmates. Suffice it to say, he was as prickly in real life as he was in his written life.
I should buy this book and hand it out to my friends who've recently moved to Brooklyn then ask me why I can't stand going back to that neighborhood for even a dinner party.
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On Condé Nast World Trade Center: For Real!?
I don't care what job it is, or what company it's for, you couldn't pay me enough to work in that crypt. That is just some bad, Poltergeist-level karma right there.
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On On Being Laid Off from Harper's
D'oh! I meant 2006. Oh man, I'm getting old.
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On On Being Laid Off from Harper's
Man, Harper's lost me somewhere around 1996 and their 594th cover story about how shitty and illegitimate the Bush Administration was, and how the war in Iraq was illegal and entered into under false pretenses, and how torture is bad, etc. and so on.
Hey, Harper's editors! If I'm reading your shitty magazine I probably already agree with you. This, of course, gets to my problem with a lot of old-guard lefty journalism: you keep telling me shit I already know as if it's a profound revelation you only just discovered.
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On This is Russia's Fifth Major Terrorist Event in a Year
This, by the way, is why airport security is a joke. There will always be a way, always be a weak spot that a committed person or persons can exploit to kill a whole lot of people either on airplanes or in the airport itself. All the scanners and enhanced pat-downs in the world won't be able to stop someone from blowing themselves up in, say, the clusterfuck around the security gate.
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On Dining Out in New York City
I have to say, this piece perfectly describes how my wife and I eavesdrop on people. I like it that you don't even pretend you're doing anything else.
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On 'Crash': The Most Loathsome Best Picture Of Them All
The last scene alone of 'Brokeback Mountain' is better than the entirety of 'Crash'. And to put it in straight guy calculus - when Ennis smells Jack's shirt, it destroys me the same way the death of Spock in 'Wrath of Khan' does.