"There was a young man in Westphalia,
Who had charge of much costly regalia,
To his sweetheart he said,
My dear, when we’re wed,
We’ll call our first girl Lucy Tania."
Maritime history is rife with fascinating chronicles from all corners of the globe, plotted by seafarers and passengers of all clans and creeds with backcloths that could exhibit the sheer marvel of a colossal dry dock or the unmistakable sapphire of the endless, whisking tapestry of the sea. However,…
"You Live On in Me..."
The 1980's had come and gone, and gone with it was an era of infinite neon, gaudy style and unflinching visual excess. The natural reaction, from society and art as a whole, was to expel the preceding decade from the collective consciousness with the intensity of a well-fueled flamethrower. With the emergence of the grunge scene and a resurgent, rebellious sense of teenage angst, the cultural zeitgeist of the 1990's seemed ripe for mature, challenging…
“To my sweet, everlasting West Nevada…”
“It was Friday morn when we set sail,
And we were not so far from the land,
When our captain, he spied a mermaid so fair,
With a comb and a glass in her hand.
Oh, the ocean waves do roll,
And the stormy winds do blow.
We old sailors are skipping at the top,
While the landlubbers lie down below, below, below,
Oh, the landlubbers lie down below.
And up spoke the captain…
It's an outright miracle that a film would attempt to condense the uniquely arcane mystique of history's greatest songwriter into a, frankly, cookie-cutter, two-hour, biopic experience. Ironically (and regrettably), the film succeeds in confining a labyrinthine period down to a serving size deemed digestible for the moviegoing populace, remarkably undermining the film's message which seeks to champion an ideal of label-less, artistic integrity. As many astute reviewers have indicated, Chalamet's performance is worthy of praise for its mechanical authenticity, with…
There's a scientific scale that's thoroughly interesting on the whole but holds a special sort of kinship with 1996's 'Jack', a meandering, uncomfortable treatise upon what is, no doubt, a flawed misunderstanding of childhood. It's called the 'Schmidt Sting Pain Index', a sort of insect rolodex which gauges and often, amusingly characterizes the consequences of various stings which can be experienced by a human being. For example, Schmidt himself describes the sting of a yellowjacket (Level 2) as, "hot and…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Nearly 83 years ago, Bob Kane and (let's face it, mostly) Bill Finger collaborated on what was to become the gold standard of superhero fare, an exemplar for generations of lucrative film and print endeavors and a monolith by which all are measured against. Their brainchild, Batman, wasn't exactly cut from the same cloth of the light-hearted, largely surface-level fare that dotted the comic book landscape in the early part of the 20th century. The Caped Crusader's nightly do-gooding and…
