Bookworm Room

Tweet Aside from showing himself incapable of pronouncing Aung San Suu Kyi’s name (and she’s only one of the most visible democracy activists in the world), Obama also insisted on referring to the country he visited as Myanmar.  In doing so, he showed scant respect both for U.S.-determined nomenclature and for those Burmese who lived [...]

5 Comments »

Tweet Everything flows from the top.  I’m not saying that Obama encouraged his advance Security Service team to have riotous orgies, but I’m also not surprised that a corrupt administration ends up having corrupt employees.  A leader’s ethos will always trickle down. Speaking of which, I see a continuum between Michelle Obama sully the White [...]

11 Comments »

Tweet BrianE, thanks for the reminder of one of the great moments in TV comedy.  When WKRP in Cincinnati was good, it was about as good as TV gets:

1 Comment »

Tweet A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the NPR and NY Times reviews that raved about a new sitcom called Aliens in America, in which a Muslim Pakistani exchange student comes to an “All American” home and community.  I hadn’t yet seen the show, so I blogged, instead, about the fact [...]

11 Comments »

Tweet During World War II, Hollywood started churning out cartoons poking fun at Hitler.  Here’s a great example from Warner Brothers with Bugs taking Hitler on, and Disney did the famous Der Fuehrer’s Face, starring Donald Duck.  The cartoons obviously weren’t intended to minimize the dangers America was facing.  They were produced at the height [...]

6 Comments »

Tweet I was going to write a review of Friday Night Lights but, somehow, never got around to it. My bottom line would have been: Watch It! Fortunately, S.T. Karnick, writing at National Review Online, has written the review I thought about, if only I could write so well. Karnick’s bottom line is the same [...]

2 Comments »

Tweet I think it’s time for me to explain why, after a life as a Democrat, I’ve turned my back so vehemently on my former party, and why I reject the word “liberal,” even though I once embraced it, and still hold to the classic ideas for which is stands. However, this will not be [...]

3 Comments »

Tweet Considering that it is a manic polemic, I’m not surprised that Studio 60 is not doing well in the ratings.

3 Comments »

Tweet I’ve now watched two episodes of Aaron Sorkin’s new show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Well, to be completely honest, I sort of watched two episodes, sinced I slept through most of the second. The show has the usual Sorkin trademarks — incredibly rapid-fire dialogue, some of it clever; a camera that likes [...]

14 Comments »

Tweet Mr. Bookworm rented a movie called Tigerland the other day, about men being trained to go off to the Vietnam War. I found it unwatchable, in large part because every other word was a filthy obscenity. There was almost no substance to the dialogue, just foul language. Thinking back, this has been part and [...]

12 Comments »

Tweet Here’s a fascinating NPR radio story about relationships between African-American men and women: A clip from the upcoming film Diary of a Tired Black Man is generating a great deal of buzz in the African-American community. The scene features a man arriving at the house of his former spouse with a new partner: a [...]

No Comments »

Tweet Sometimes, someone writes an article that manages to touch upon more than one issue near and dear to me. Catherine Seipp managed to do just that when she wrote about Walkout, a new HBO film. Walkout is about historic injustice, circa 1968: You’d need a heart of stone not to root for the plucky, [...]

10 Comments »