Posts Tagged ‘Mixed Media’
The Canary Islands Government Allowed “Fast & Furious 6″ To Destroy Their Highway With a Tank
Friday, 24 May 2013 17:43
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Fast & Furious 6
Universal Pictures
130 minutes

Hands down, Fast & Furious 6 is by far the best movie ever made to feature Ludacris and Tyrese trapped in a Jeep dangling inches off the ground from an imperiled cargo plane.

And there is so, so much more to cherish about the film.

(Read more…)

The Fast & Furious franchise has become genuinely fascinating over the last couple of years. One of the most fascinating things about the series is the addition of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as the ultra-brawny Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs, a character who seemingly cannot go ten minutes without torturing somebody for information. Another fascinating thing is that after a long stretch of churning out barely passable B-movies, the series somehow managed to produce critically acclaimed entertainment, starting with 2011′s Fast Five. (The sixth film has received similarly high marks.) Credit for the newfound critic-and-crowd-pleasing goes to Taiwanese-born American filmmaker Justin Lin, who initially demonstrated the full extent of his directorial talents with the stereotype-subverting independent film Better Luck Tomorrow in 2002.

But the single most fascinating thing about the series so far is the enormous tank in Fast & Furious 6. The tank is arguably the main character in the movie.

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“Arrested Development” Was The Best TV Satire of the Bush Era
Friday, 24 May 2013 05:00
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Arrested Development is finally (for real this time) coming back. On May 26 at exactly 12:01 a.m. PDT, the series’ fourth season will debut exclusively on Netflix, the on-demand streaming service that on any given weeknight accounts for nearly a third of Internet traffic in North America. It’s a hotly anticipated premiere that fans are praying will not crash the website. (Read more…)

This TV series—about a spoiled family wading through a glut of personal, financial, and international scandal—occupies a place in popular culture that few other shows have managed to reach. Fans have even witnessed Arrested Development burrow itself into Western politics. In March 2011, before NATO forces launched an air war that would help topple Moammar Qaddafi‘s mass-murdering regime in Libya, The New Republic ran a fantastic slideshow comparing the notorious Qaddafi family to Arrested Development‘s Bluth clan. During a speech this month in the House of Commons of Canada, opposition leader Thomas Mulcair quoted a famous episode of Arrested Development while criticizing the prime minister for over $3 billion in unaccounted anti-terrorism funding. And as the series revival neared, Republicans started dropping Arrested Development references to ridicule the Affordable Care Act, Democratic leadership, and the Obama administration.

The series has also found its way into the syllabi of college courses, and onto the pages of academic essays. “The writers worked miracles addressing philosophical and social issues,” says J. Jeremy Wisnewski, an associate professor of philosophy at Hartwick College who served as a volume editor on the book Arrested Development and Philosophy. “To see the way race, gender, sexual orientation, and class are handled in the show is to witness genius at work.”

There’s something else the show handled so well that’s often taken for granted: During its original run on Fox from 2003 to 2006, the series delivered what was arguably the sharpest satire of the Bush era and the Iraq War that has ever been broadcast on television.

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The NRA’s List of “Coolest Gun Movies” Is Astoundingly Dumb
Wednesday, 22 May 2013 12:51
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When conservatives try to list their favorite pop-culture items to make a political point, the results are often baffling. In 2005, Human Events released the list of “Most Harmful Books” written in the 19th and 20th centuries (Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill are put in the same league as Hitler and Mao). The following year, National Review compiled a much-discussed “50 greatest conservative rock songs,” which for whatever bizarre reason included Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun.” In 2012, the Telegraph declared their brazenly idiotic “top 10 conservative movies of the modern era.” And just over a week ago, the American Enterprise Institute posted the “21 greatest conservative rap songs of all time,” which prominently features Justin Bieber. (Read more…)

And now American Rifleman, the National Rifle Association’s shooting and firearms consumer magazine, has published its official list of the 10 “Coolest Gun Movies.” Writes American Rifleman blogger Paul Rackley, “Many of these movies also take us back to simpler times, when dreaming of saving the day got us through that oh-so boring class.” Here’s his list:

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