Raritania

Here's the post I wrote after Black Panther 2's second weekend. I didn't get it posted in time, but thought it best to put it up...

As of its third weekend Black Panther 2 has taken in just under $368 million --by all conventional measures, a healthy sum indeed. But this ...

Not long ago I wrote about how film critics have become much more prone to give good reviews of films this past decade or so --in spite of t...

Jack London is said to have thought that, at least on the level of his intended conveyance of his critique of the individualistic outlook ex...

Hollywood's release schedule continues to normalize. The summer release schedule was thinner than usual (a mere four top-grade would-be...

Between the late 1990s and the mid-2010s there would seem to have been an extraordinary boom in Young Adult (YA) fiction. Hence phenomena li...

I have in the past had occasion to remark George Carlin's remarks about the word " lifestyle "--which seem to me to absolutely...

Recently writing about the popularity of superheroes in contemporary culture I emphasized that this was a matter of film above all, and in ...

I remember that when reading RJ Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars I was impressed with it as a hugely impressive work offering pretty m...

It is difficult to speak frankly and substantively about the "higher learning in America" for many reasons, the one that seems to...

Not long ago I returned to the depressing activity of perusing recent bestseller lists . I say depressing because of how consistently they c...

The series The Critic was part of that early '90s boom in "not just for kids" American prime time animation that followed the...

Those who have remarked the backlash against the Disney-era Star Wars saga--and certainly its more political component, which has been the o...

Back when I was just starting to move beyond the lowbrow in my cinematic tastes I discovered the films of Jean-Luc Godard--largely by way of...

When I have written about the 1990s I have tended to focus on the post-Cold War triumphalism, the tech boom, and altogether the vision of ex...