Alexander (2004) Review
Alexander (2004) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Oliver Stone spent a hundred and fifty-five million dollars on a life that has no shape, released it, and then recut it three separate times across ten years trying…
Tag: War (Page 2)
1940sPan’s Labyrinth (2006) Review
Pan's Labyrinth (2006) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Del Toro built two worlds with identical rules and let a child move between them, and the fascist captain is more frightening than anything in the labyrinth. It…
1940sThe Pianist (2002) Review
The Pianist (2002) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Polanski survived the Krakow Ghetto as a child and spent sixty years declining to film the Holocaust before he made this. It won the Palme d'Or and three…
1940sInglourious Basterds (2009) Review
Inglourious Basterds (2009) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Tarantino wrote it in 1998, could not solve the ending, made Kill Bill instead, and came back a decade later. The opening scene is a twenty-five minute conversation…
2000sAtonement (2007) Review
Atonement (2007) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A thirteen-year-old tells a lie and two lives end. The last ten minutes do not reveal a fact, they change what kind of object you have been watching.
1970sVoyage of the Damned (1976) Review
Voyage of the Damned (1976) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The true story of the MS St. Louis, which carried 937 Jewish refugees out of Hamburg in 1939 and was refused entry everywhere it went. A…
DialogueErnest Hemingway Day: The Iceberg Method
Hemingway built a prose style out of omission and spent thirty years being imitated badly by people who copied the short sentences and missed the method. The technique is learnable. The imitations fail because they reproduce the surface and skip…
Book ReviewsThe Forever War
The Forever War does something almost no other war novel manages: it makes alienation measurable. Joe Haldeman takes the distance a soldier feels coming home and literalizes it across decades and centuries, building the best portrait of that specific rupture…
HistoryArmistice Day: What a Renaming Costs
For thirty-six years the United States called 11 November Armistice Day. Then it became Veterans Day, and a specific moment gave way to a general one.
HistoryVE Day: The War That Was Still Running
Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945 and Europe filled the streets. The war had four months left to run, and my grandfather was still a prisoner for every day of it.
HistoryVJ Day: The Record That Only Exists Because Somebody Wrote It Down
The surrender took about twenty minutes aboard the USS Missouri. My grandfather had been a prisoner for three years and four months, and the record of it survives only because he sat down afterward and rebuilt it from memory.
GeopoliticsStuck in the Middle: Wars, Weapons, and the Next Thirty Years
Connects cognitive decline, civic collapse, military overreach, and geopolitical competition into one structural argument about the next thirty years.