End zones

A few years back, I came across the interesting observation — I think it was in an essay on Sophia Coppola — that most directors address only a single theme or question across all the movies they make in their careers, using each film to come closer to an answer they’ll be satisfied with. This [...]

Many a true word

As superhero movies go, The Dark Knight is certainly the best of the bunch — although why Christian Bale’s perfectly normal voice had to descend to a guttural rasp every time he put on his bat helmet escapes me, and one must also assign a few demerit points to the filmmakers for portraying the Russian [...]

Tesseractia

Two rather interesting blogs to let you all know about — both, happily, by fellow Canadians. First, Lee Hamilton’s Platonic Shift is a fun and often thought-provoking blend of commentary on pop culture, science and technology, and Catholicism. And second, Classical Bookworm (discovered via Platonic Shift), a blog written by a British Columbian (and, interestingly, [...]

John Bolton’s correlation of forces

It used to be said by security analysts, back in the days of the Cold War, that the Soviet Union, though benighted in so many other ways, managed to maintain a highly sophisticated and realistic view of the balance of power across the various geographies over which it was in contention with the United States. [...]