So this animated movie pretty much came and went during the last week of April but I might as well talk about it anyway. What Works: Well, like all Aardman claymation movies (the same guys who make all the Wallace and Gromit films and the excellent Chicken Run about a decade back), the movie is…
Author: Alabama Liberal
Movie Review: Why “Battleship” Deserves To Be the Flop of the Summer
This movie is awful. I’d like to take a small victory lap in that as I correctly put it on my “List of five movies that will suck,” summer list. What Works: Virtually nothing. I can’t single out the direction because it was a mess. The script featured everything that’s wrong with Hollywood movies. And…
Monday Morning Movie Reviewer: The Avengers
So I semi-reviewed this movie when I talked about the experience of seeing it in China, but this is more the standard review…By now, literally everybody that goes to the movies has seen this but I might as well discuss it anyway. What Works: This movie is thoroughly mediocre, and exactly what you’d expect…so in…
Shanghai Sites and Scenery (Pictures Inside)
As a follow-up to the “editorial” I posted a few weeks back about Shanghai’s singular architecture, it’s finally time I make good on a promise to post more pictures from the trip. It’s not been easy to load the pictures onto the site for some reason, but I’m truly sorry it took this long. [The…
Working Class Economist: May’s Rich Asshole of the Month Is…
With my recent trip to China and ongoing struggle to post pictures from Shanghai and Hong Kong (more coming tomorrow…I hope) some regular features on the site have suffered as of late. And perhaps none more so than the regular “Rich Asshole of the Month” feature which is coming in at the 11th hour on…
Consider Buying an Alabama Liberal T-Shirt
http://alabamaliberal.spreadshirt.com/ That’s a link to our t-shirt designs which you can customize in any size or color you want. The profits on the shirts aren’t more than 4 to 6 dollars on each one (depending on which one you buy) but it would go a long way towards making the site even somewhat profitable instead…
Alabama Liberal’s May Book of the Month Club Pick Is…
Christopher Buckley’s “They Eat Puppies Don’t They?”! In this superb satire, Buckley (the brilliant satirist behind “Thank You For Smoking”) takes on the symbiotic yet adversarial relationship between China and the United States, and includes scores of great pot shots about the military industrial complex for good measure. The book begins when defense industry lobbyist…
Larger Editorial: Shanghai’s Unique Architecture (Pictures Galore Inside)
The first thing you notice about Shanghai is that it has an architectural style unlike any other city in the world. It’s as if the world’s biggest Blade Runner fan decided to plan an entire city around steampunk designs. Here are only a few examples… …
Blue State Vs. Communist State: Why The Chinese Make Republicans Look Flexible
Note: I realize that title has the sweeping generalization of something I’d probably think was racist if it were said about, ummm…Nigerians or Mexicans or even people from the Philippines. However, the Chinese government is newly rich and a serious threat to world stability (more on how their government is literally the shadiest in the…
What’s It Like to Go to the Movies in China? (With Humiliating Kevin Spacey Picture)
Continuing on with our Alabama Liberal China week, I thought it might interest some—-not many, but some—-to know what it’s like to go to a movie (The Avengers) in Shanghai. If you answered “Probably not much different and you’re wasting our time writing about this when you could be endlessly talking about the presidential election,”…
TV Review: What’s It Like to Watch TV in China?
Kicking off our China week on the site after a two week trip to Shanghai (and weekend in Hong Kong) begins with a twist on our usual media Mondays. Later on today I’ll be talking about Chinese “cinema,” but first let’s talk about one of the last things anyone would notice before they visited China…
Alabama Liberal Goes to China!
If that title wasn’t straightforward enough, let me confirm that, yes, I did just get back from a recent two week trip to China (specifically, Shanghai and then a shorter time in Hong Kong). The next two weeks of the blog will be a deviation from the articles that usually run as I hope to…
A Final Roundup of Missed 2011 Movies including The Artist, Win Win, A Separation, Conan Can’t Stop, and More
So what in the hell does that awkward title mean? It means that I recently took a very long international roundtrip on an airplane (more about where I went tomorrow, but I think most readers will be in for a surprise) and one of the only things keeping you sane back in coach—-where I was…