as we may blog

…while Tony enjoys a New York slice

The review may be more inspired than the movie:

The screams and the images of smoke billowing through the canyons of Lower Manhattan may make you think of the attack, and you may curse the filmmakers for their vulgarity, insensitivity or lack of imagination. (The director, Matt Reeves, lives in Los Angeles, as does the writer, Drew Goddard, and the movie’s star producer, J. J. Abrams.) But the film is too dumb to offend anything except your intelligence, and the monster does cut a satisfying swath through the cast, so your only complaint may be, What took it so long?

Cloverfield (2008)

The New Yorker juxtaposes Mike Bloomberg’s presidential flirtations with a little history about third parties in US presidential elections. But, as Remnick asks, is Bloomberg really just another bee, a spoiler candidate along the lines of Nader or Perot?

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially, third-party candidacies usually grew organically out of some overarching moral vision. The Liberty and Free-Soil Parties stood against the evil enormity of chattel slavery; the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas embodied a suppressed yearning for social justice and greater economic equality. “When a third party’s demands become popular enough, they are appropriated by one or both of the major parties and the third party disappears,” Richard Hofstadter wrote, in “The Age of Reform.” “Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.” Bloomberg is not without ideas about political and economic reform, but he professes no grand and specific national plan. Still less has he evinced any desire to sting and then die.

Wealth of Nations: Comment: The New Yorker

I do not know why people bother spending the time or money to hire professionals. Some of the most sage advice I have ever read has been scrawled on the subway posters which grace dank innards of our city. For the low price of $2 you get access to an open forum where no subject is off-limits.

newyorkshitty.com » Blog Archive » Subway Sagacy

I agree with this one, although more should have been made of Jimmi Simpson’s impressive performance in Aaron Sorkin’s The Farnsworth Invention:

This information-crammed, surface-skimming biodrama about the creators of television suggests nothing so much as a classroom presentation on a seven-figure budget.

The show certainly deserves high marks for all those traits that exacting schoolteachers hold dear: conciseness, legibility, correct use of topic sentences, evidence in defense of two sides of an argument and colorful examples to support the main thesis.

This one I don’t agree with, save for the reference to “aesthetic overkill” (From Doris to Darlene):

There’s also real insight under Harrison’s stylized surfaces. Although he loves these hopeless musical romantics, he doesn’t romanticize them. He understands that passion – musical and otherwise – often feels closer to nausea, and that a creative fire can be a fickle flicker at best.

We’re seeing August: Osage County this weekend, which we’re both very excited about about which we are very excited. For good reason, it sounds like.