Raritania

In July Hayao Miyazaki recently published an essay criticizing the recent course of the country in the areas of foreign and defense policy, ...

The term "independent film" refers to a mode of filmmaking as old as the cinema, its meaningful use going back at least to the fou...

Some years ago an acquaintance showed me a script by a friend of his--who was, by the way, no stranger to Hollywood--that he told me was nea...

This past weekend Sylvester Stallone's Bullet to the Head opened to a mere $4.5 million--a career low for the star. This came a mere th...

The old studio system that created the idea of the film star died a half century ago, but the idea of the star has remained, and film indust...

In my previous post on the politics of the Showcase series Continuum I suggested that the future history of the series at least suggests s...

Over at War is Boring , a post by Robert Beckhusen on the more dramatic appearances of the F-35 fighter has made in Hollywood films--which ...

It seems today that no major event film comes out without a lot of talk in the press speculating about , and then covering , how it does in ...

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was the comic which introduced me to Alan Moore, and as might be expected, it deeply impressed me wit...

Back in the 1980s a vast literature analyzing contemporary Japan emerged in the West, and certainly the United States. It became so pervasiv...

Shintaro Ishihara has made a literary , and then a political, career out of grabbing attention with inflammatory remarks. It was certainly s...

Watching The Dark Knight back in 2008 I was deeply impressed by the film's use of the Joker as a Trickster/Shadow figure, and the const...

Originally Published in THE FIX , January 1, 2008 One of the most popular games in international relations has always been "Guess the...

Last year a story in The Japan Times asked "Is Shintaro Ishihara The Most Dangerous Man in Japan?" Ishihara is a far-right Japa...

The title of this post says it all--I am asking what you, the readers of Raritania , would like to see me doing here on this blog, whether t...