I can’t think of a year in recent memory that offered so much and got recognized for so little. This year, people’s moods were generally pretty down thanks to a sluggish worldwide economy and dismal U.S. jobs numbers. [Of course, it doesn’t help that one of the two U.S. political parties tried to milk every…
Author: Alabama Liberal
Petty Issues: End of the Year Edition
As we close out the year, let’s take a look at everything our wonderful Republicans did for us in 2011: First the new Tea Party-led House of Representatives kick started the year by holding the economy hostage over renewing the Bush tax cuts, then they held it hostage over passing a yearly budget, then they…
Monday Morning Movie Reviewer: Mission Impossible 4
It seems like everyone in America saw this movie already this weekend (who knew Tom Cruise could still pack houses like that?) but for those that didn’t…let me muddy the waters of if you should go or not by saying this is a solid B movie. If you like cartoonish action movies (I prefer darker…
Movie Review: We Bought a Zoo
One of the movies that opened during this busy Christmas week, and also (unfortunately) one of the least successful at the box office. It might be a one-joke movie (it’s literally in the title) but it turns out that that one joke is a pretty good one. What Works: Matt Damon instantly elevates this story…
Movie Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I’ll be right up front in saying I enjoyed this movie. It may not be the movie I was hoping it would be (it was directed by the amazing David Fincher after all), but I feel it did the best possible job it could have with the book’s source material. I haven’t actually read the…
Movie Review: The Adventures of TinTin
At the risk of severely angering any European or African fans of Alabama Liberal (all…well I was going to say “all two of them” but there are probably as many people on other continents reading the site as those in Alabama itself), I have to admit right off the bat that I was a little…
Petty Issues: Christmas Edition
Worst Present: A pack of socks…No matter how much someone pretends like it’s something they needed, they’re lying. Sure, you might “need” socks, but you probably also need a tooth brush, shaving cream, bar soap, or any number of things you could buy at a drug store for a pocketful of loose change. Worst Food:…
Occupy Y’all Street, Why Alabama SHOULD Be Protesting Too
On Working Class Economist, we like to cover an economic issue by what it means for the people CNBC never talks about: the majority of Americans, and by that I mean people making less than 35,000 a year. And no where is more working class (or desperately in need of clarification on economic issues) than…
Monday Morning Movie Reviewer: The Descendants
This movie stars George Clooney as a Hawaiian father of two whose wife is left permaneantly comatose from a boating accident, and only after that accident does he learn that she was cheating on him. It is also a sure thing best picture nominee and will be on almost every critic’s top ten list. Problem is…I’m…
Movie Review: Sherlock Holmes, Game of Shadows
The good news: this movie is exactly what you think it would be…that’s also the bad news. What Works: This is clearly a sequel that wants to leave the first one’s audience happy so once again Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are back as the ambiguously gay duo, Holmes doesn’t want Watson to get…
Movie Review: Cedar Rapids
Later today will bring reviews of some more current movies (Sherlock Holmes 2 and The Descendants) but first comes this smaller hit that opened earlier in the year but somehow I never got around to seeing it. In it, Ed Helms plays a mild-mannered, (very) small town insurance salesman who goes to the “big” city of Cedar…
TV Review: Homeland
So only a few hours ago, Showtime’s Homeland ended their first season, and (despite a few crafty suspense sequences) it ended not with a bang, but with a whimper. [Spoilers: By contrast, Showtime’s only other credible drama, Dexter, finally kicked things into high gear with the predictable death of the Doomsday Killer but at the…
Sunday’s Sermons: Inside the Death of the “Atheist Pope” Christopher Hitchens
This past week, the man known as “The Atheist Pope,” Christopher Hitchens, lost his long battle with cancer. Now, not everyone who follows politics is familiar with Christopher Hitchens. So if I had to pick just one book to sum up the man, I would pick Hitchens’s “God is Not Good” as a pretty accurate place…