Spike Lee's master thesis on the roots of our current racist evil, written under the advisership of our last 400 years of racist evil. This may be a scorching 70's quasi-biopic period piece dripping with highly flammable funk and fury, but Lee wraps his joint up in all the threads of today's shitty racism, and the incendiary auteur is determined to show his audience how those threads make up a fuse which winds back through the fabric of our country…

13th is a documentary that spends its first half moving at a break-neck pace through decades of U.S. history, hitting all the important historical points to support its thesis: that slavery never truly ended thanks to an exemption in the 13th amendment to the Constitution that makes it legal to use prisoners as slave labor. The second half of the film then focuses on how this sneaky provision continues to shape contemporary America, and what's being done to stop it.…

The movie opens with a shocker that explains the title: James Bond--greatest living spy and highly decorated world-renowned (?!) member of the Royal Navy--is shown being murdered in Hong Kong. Could it possibly be true? (answer: does it say somewhere that the movie is actually only five minutes long?) Of course not! It's all an elaborate ruse to convince Bond's enemies that he's finally dead so he can go undercover… as someone who looks, walks, and talks exactly like James…

The Anime Marches On! 2020 Challenge (23/32)
Three anime films of my choice (2/3)
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The pride of Japan lives again…and gets a chance to save the world. In the far future, the massive World War II Japanese battleship Yamato has been resurrected from its grave on the ocean floor (where it had been sent by American bombers who intercepted the vessel as it was attempting a last-ditch suicide mission) and dispatched across the galaxy to meet with aliens whose…

The very first shot of Jim and Andy is of a now gray-bearded 55-year-old Jim Carrey, and it feels like he's playing a character. Is this Old Jim we're seeing? Or Documentary Jim? Or are we just so used to Some Character Jim that we don't recognize the real him when we see it? Or even more disconcerting: did Real Jim get tossed aside somewhere along the road to the fame he now enjoys, possibly lost in the funhouse that…

If ever I'm in a coma and you can't reach me, play some of Bill Conti's score for the Rocky series (Conquest might work best). That about illustrates how deeply Rocky resonates with me, and a lot of other people.

Poverty. Illness. Discrimination. Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

Rocky speaks past those battles to the deepest part of each of us, the part which may sometimes be beaten but refuses to be defeated. And…