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…
Category: Mindless Mondays
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…
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…
TV Review: I Recap the “Desperate Housewives” Series Finale, So You Don’t Have to Watch It
Dear Readers, there is a shameful period of my past that I’m none too happy about. No, I don’t mean any incidents in college or high school that may or may not involve elaborate pranks and debauchery, I mean the 2004-2005 television season when I, like just about anyone at the time who was watching…
Mom Joke: Collar on Backwards
A little boy got on the bus, sat next to a man reading a book, and noticed he had his collar on backwards. The little boy asked why he wore his collar backwards. The man, who was a priest, said, ‘I am a Father’ The little boy replied, ‘My Daddy doesn’t wear his collar like…
Entertainment Editorial: Five Shows Ruined By Success
In an age of a thousand TV channels, it’s become harder than ever to really break out and enjoy that fleeting sensation known as “success” in television—-the kind of thing that can get Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner and The Sopranos’s David Chase enough money to never have to work for five lifetimes—-and that can guarantee…
Why “Mad Men,” Gets the Difference Between the 60’s Fantasies of the Past and Realities of the Future
By now so many shows have been set in the 50’s and 60’s that they’re practically a sub genre of their own (albeit not usually a successful one). The “60’s set shows” often showcase intact nuclear families being as wholesome and perfect as the time allows while grappling through a series of “world changing events”…
TV Review: “Touch,” a Show Worth Saving
It’s that time of year when the broadcast networks (ABC, Fox, pitiful-ratings-wise-but-decent-creatively NBC, and pitiful-quality-wise-but-explosive-ratings-wise CBS) begin to schedule their shows for the upcoming Fall season, and that means that within a couple weeks we’ll know the fates of all the “bubble” shows that could either get renewed or get put out to pasture. Now…