Back in the now-distant seeming decade known as the 00’s or aughties or the Bush II years or whatever the hell history chooses to remember it as (but it probably won’t want to remember it at all) the one truly remarkable thing happening wasn’t in the gradually worsening economy or gloomy foreign policy outlook or…
Category: Mindless Mondays
TV Review: Why AMC’s “The Pitch” Excites AND Frustrates
So in addition to Mad Men and every other AMC drama, I also watch AMC’s latest (but not last) foray into reality programming called “The Pitch.” The Pitch is part of a troubling trend in AMC programming towards cheap and easy reality shows (like Kevin Smith’s deathly boring Comic Book Men and the upcoming Small…
TV Review: Mad Men’s Season Finale Recap and Review
Note: I do spoil what happened in last night’s season 5 finale, so don’t read further if you haven’t watched it yet. Or perhaps skip down to the review portion… What Happened: The episode begins with Don in terrible pain from a toothache and Megan’s mother (the alternately seductive and bitter Juliette Binoche) visiting them…
Reviewing The Season Finales of “Touch,” “House,” “Awake,” “Revenge,” “Parks and Recreation,” and more
So pretty much all season finales are done (except for excellent cable shows like Mad Men or HBO’s Girls/Veep), and since most of them were done weeks ago, I can review without fear of spoilers… Revenge…What Happened: Emily “finally” came face to face with a white-haired man who apparently killed her father. She beat him…
Movie Review: The Dictator
This was my third most anticipated movie of the summer (behind Prometheus and, of course, The Dark Knight Rises). I’m sorry to say it’s merely pretty good. I’m really torn on this one, because I absolutely love all the risks that Sacha Baron Cohen took, but I don’t think all of them pay off. What…
Movie Review: Men in Black III
So this movie is a little bit better than you might think (which matches up with my expectations of it as being in the middle ground for summer movies, not too bad, not extremely good). And in that way, it’s a minor miracle that a film that really says nothing and was made solely to…
Movie Review: The Pirates
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…
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…
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…
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…