We need to talk about a few things. The performances in this movie are impeccably disturbing. The plot is excruciatingly enthralling. The outlook is bleak. The soundtrack is upbeat. You want to look away but you can’t because you think you have an idea of what might happen, and then it does happen, and you still can’t take your eyes off of the social and emotional meltdown happening right in front of you. This particular meltdown is told through a series of flashbacks, memories, and present experiences. The story follows the relationship between Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) and her son, Kevin. While John C. Reilly plays the role of...

Jurassic Park: The Game Demo Download       Jurassic Park: The Game is an episodic, downloadable third-person adventure video game developed by Telltale Games that is based on the Jurassic Park franchise. The game, which is the latest of several Universal/Telltale deals, was originally announced in June 2010 before being revealed in the February issue of Game Informer. The first episode was expected for release in April 2011, but instead will be pushed back to November 15 along with the original Console (PlayStation 3/Xbox 360) release, resulting in a multi-platform release with all 5 episodes at once. Development The game was originally announced on June 8, 2010 along...

A 1956 film starring Robert Stack and Nigel Bruce. Thoughtful consideration of the merits of Bwana Devil shall without doubt lead any sirius reviewer to the inescapable conclusion that it ranks with Plan 9 From Outer Space as tying for the worst movie ever made. From the crayon-like credits to the stock jungle drums to the dull script and hilarious title, to the gloriously miscast actors, there is no disputing that Bwana Devil is an exercise in sheer waste of time, raw meat misdirected at the feet of vegetarians. The story is the famous predation in Tsavo, Tanzania, in the 1890s by two lions which killed or devoured some...

The prevailing view of the cause of the hyper-inflation which Germany experienced under the Weimar Republic between 1919 and 1924 is that it resulted from the republicans’ attempt to lessen the burden of reparations imposed by the Versailles Treaty by paying the debt with increasingly worthless marks. Fergusson shows in detail that, although there was cognizance among the Weimar administrators that the burden of reparations was being somewhat lessened by the inflation, this was merely a side-effect of the phenomenon. Not only were reparations substantially paid in foreign currency or gold-backed marks, making the collapse of Reichsbank marks incapable of satisfying the Versailles reparations, but the several Republican cabinets...

A remarkable work studiously ignored when it was published in mid-1941 and alternately attacked or maligned by America’s mainstream press and censored class-rooms since. Could perhaps be sub-titled “The Great American Children’s Crusade” except the actors in the piece, though naïve in the extreme, were not children and were far better organized than any medieval crusade. Yet the “incredible revolution” of the burgeoning popularity of Communism in America in the 1930s was just as delusional, and as wildly popular at its height between 1937 and 1941 as that medieval drama. At a time when virtually the entire intelligentsia in the United States, not to mention the rest of the...

My first comment is to note that the not-so-kind Professor—and it seems there is no aspect of human affairs so absurd or so preposterous that some professor somewhere has not built a highly lucrative tenure teaching upon its foundation—far from adhering to his own strictures that Communism in Italy was in no way Italian but was part and parcel of the global Communist Party as administered by the Comintern, posed the title of his book as “the Origins of Italian Communism” rather than “the Origins of the Communist Party of Italy”, thus exposing the first of many contradictions and obfuscations by Professor Williams. This book is a tendentious, unimaginative...

Starring Ray Milland and teenage heart-throb Frankie Avalon. A cult-classic that I absolutely love. Story begins with a family of four leaving Los Angelos at 4 in the morning for an extended vacation in the Sierra mountains. The year is 1963, just after the Cuban missile crisis. As their car is climbing the hills east of LA they look back and see atomic mushroom clouds rising over the city. The movie is the story of their survival in the wilderness in the face of deprivation, attack by hoodlums, family feuding, and paranoid fear of anyone who might pose a threat, which meant everyone for some time. Filmed in black...

I saw Crazy Heart last year and absolutely loved it. Jeff Bridges is authentic in the role of Bad Blake, a self proclaimed washed up country music singer and songwriter. It was one of the best movies I saw all year. Highly recommended.

Written by the doyen of Civil War historians, this is the final work in a series of ground-breaking narratives on the emergence of the Union Army from virtually nothing in the crucible of unexpected war. With a deft hand, he traces the evolution of the Union Army, afflicted as few armies have been, by an officer corps that made corpses appear lively by comparison—indeed producing corpses by the thousand by their astounding incompetence. In campaign after campaign, battle after battle, Catton demonstrates how carefully laid plans—none too intelligently laid in any event—were botched or allowed to fail from simple failure to move, or to adequately supply, or by a...

A glittering tome replete with fire and fancy. Historian DeVoto details the inundation of North America by Europeans and the tearing of the veil of ignorance that lay over the continent of mystery coming gradually to realize that it is not an extension of Asia, that its lands are not dotted with cities of gold, and that no water passage to the Pacific exists anywhere in its geography. Each chapter begins with a map with unexplored territory marked in grey; in each chapter the grey grows less as explorers, bloody fanatics, and imperialists push the boundaries of knowledge further back with each generation. He follows a constant theme: the...